ICL Helps Nationwide Building Society Cut Mortgage
Reporting Times from 5 Days to 1 Day
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ICL, the IT services company, announced the completion of a mortgage data warehousing project at Nationwide Building Society. The project enables a faster and more comprehensive analysis of customer mortgage risks, significantly reducing the time to produce results. Some reports now only take a day, having taken five days previously.
The new information management system, which is the first in Europe to use Microsoft's SQL Server 7, will provide the society's risk analysts with more effective access to a fuller range of customer data. This will then be applied to portfolio management and Nationwide believes this will help it to further control arrears and provisions for bad debt.
"Previously our analysts spent the majority of their time gathering the data, now they spend more time analysing the data, which means we are able to make faster and more informed choices about our lending policies. We are also looking to add our credit card, loan and current account databases to the system," said Roger Williams, head of Consumer Risk Management at Nationwide.
ICL managed the whole project, which started with a pilot system developed using the beta version of SQL Server 7. Following the success of this pilot the whole of Nationwide's customer mortgage database - 1.3 million accounts - was transferred to SQL Server 7 by ICL and Microsoft consultants.
"This system gives Nationwide an edge over the competition. This is vital in financial services where increases in efficiency and customer service are so important. Because of this there is huge potential for this type of system as pioneering organisations such as Nationwide prove their cost benefits," commented John Kane, UK managing director of ICL's financial service business.
Nationwide has used the new functionality and structure of SQL Server 7 in two ways:
"ICL has created a glowing example of a data warehouse for Nationwide, demonstrating very tangible business benefits," said Marina Stedman, product manager for SQL Server, Microsoft Ltd. "SQL Server 7 is an ideal platform for business intelligence solutions; it provides an open and scaleable architecture on which to build the kind of high-performance systems which were previously too complex and costly for many customers. We wish Nationwide all the best with their new information management system."
ICL is a leading supplier of IT services. Operating in over 70 countries and employing over 19,000 people, the Group's revenues for 1997 were GBP 2,477.1 million generating a pre-tax profit of GBP 30.0 million. The company implements IT systems for major projects and provides innovative services to a range of industries covering amongst others, retail, finance, travel, telecoms and utilities together with education, local and central government sectors. Its services include outsourcing, helpdesks, network services, inter/intranets, electronic commerce, interactive kiosks, smart card systems, digital cities and web sites. ICL plans to relist on the stock market in 2000.
ICL's website: http://www.icl.com.
ICL's Financial Services Division website: http://www.icl.com/fs.