Hatton National Bank (HNB)
Bank Profile
Hatton National Bank (HNB) Plc is one of the largest and one of the oldest private sector banks in Sri Lanka. The bank traces its roots to the Hatton Bank founded in 1888. HNB offers personal banking, corporate banking, development banking and international banking services. The bank also offers treasury services, mortgage financing, financial advisory and stock broking and insurance services through its subsidiaries. The company operates primarily in Sri Lanka, where it is headquartered in Colombo. The bank’s employee strength is 4,357.
Key Business Drivers
The bank had used a middleware platform to connect the core banking systems. At one point the bank was providing anywhere banking services using three different systems. A number of workarounds had to be implemented and maintained to continue providing anywhere banking services without disruption to customer service.
The third party solution worked on a legacy database platform. HNB faced a number of problems arising from the complex and legacy architecture. End-of-day reconciliation was a major problem with the ATM network going offline for 45 minutes every night. Instances of transaction dropping were common.
The in-house developed core banking solution was not centrally hosted necessitating IT support staff at every branch. That the bank had to migrate to a common core banking solution was an idea that had enjoyed consensus for long. For ten years, the bank had been working on expanding the scope of the solution to every branch, without much success.
Finally, in 2007 HNB made a decision to migrate every branch and all core operations to a single new core banking system.
Solution Components
Software
- Finacle core banking solution
- Finacle trade finance solution
- Finacle e-banking solution
- Finacle treasury solution
- Oracle Database 10.2.4
- Veritas Netbackup Backup Software
- Resin
- Jatau
- Websphere
Infrastructure includes
- Storage - SUN ST 9985, SUN STK 6140
- Load Balancers: Cisco 11501 Content Switch
- Servers - Sun E2900, Sun Fire V890, T2000, X4100, V445
- Switches (Cisco Catalyst 6509E, 3560, 3750, 2960) and routers (Cisco 7201, 1841)
Benefits
Key ROI Drivers: The Most Quantifiable Benefits
- Hardware and software cost avoidance at 87 branches that were on a decentralized banking system
- The number of customer centers increased from 186 in 2009 to 205 in December 2010 with a nominal increase in headcount.
Key Strategic and Operational Benefits
- A single unified and centralized core banking system
- A single consolidated view of the customer is now available
- The reconciliation problem has now been eliminated
- Reduced time to market for new product variants
- Customer service can now be standardized across branches
- Client facing personnel now have more time to cross sell
Key IT/Facilities Management Benefits
- Avoidance of software and IT hardware replacement (and ongoing maintenance) at branches on the decentralized system
- Considerable reduction in power costs
- Reduced maintenance costs
- IT staff has been made available for strategic projects