X
Finance

ME Bank on track for transformation update

The bank's new business management platform allows customers to open transaction accounts online.
Written by Chris Duckett, Contributor

Members Equity (ME) Bank has said that it is on track to complete its three-year technology upgrade within its original time frames.

The technology upgrade involves updating its core banking system, reporting platform, and new business process management (BPM) tool that went online this week.

Pegasystems' business process management platform was chosen as the BPM platform, and the first process implemented on it allows customers to open transaction accounts online. The process checks the customers' identity, and provides the user with their new BSB and account number and internet banking credentials, and initiates for a transaction card to be posted to the customer.

Early next year, the bank will move its other deposit banking products onto the BPM platform, followed by its loan products.

"One of the benefits of being a young challenger bank is we're not encumbered by a host of legacy systems that can have a major impact on project scope, time, and cost," said Jamie McPhee, ME Bank CEO, in a statement.

Earlier this year, the company claimed that using Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 will be over AU$100,000 cheaper than the Linux alternative in the long run.

"Although the alternative Linux-based platform is essentially free to deploy, based on our past experience, we knew that it would cost more to support than Windows. This made the overall costs of the two operating systems approximately the same," ME Bank's enterprise architect Jem Richards said at the time.

"It was clear that if we deployed our core banking systems on Windows-SQL, the total cost of ownership would be substantially less than if we chose the alternative."

Until today, the project was slated to cost AU$57 million; now, the bank says that the project will cost AU$60 million.

In November last year, the bank announced that it had selected Swiss banking software vendor Temenos to supply its core banking technology.

Editorial standards