The move follows Nationwide's first Columbus implementation in 2000 for the provision of online access to investor statements. As a result, the UK building society is now able to resolve up to 90% of statement-related customer queries on the first call, as well as turn around duplicate statement requests of up to 18 months or more directly from its call centres by fax or by post, says the building society.

Francis Walsh, divisional director of IT, Nationwide Building Society, comments: "Since the successful introduction of Columbus, we have identified a wide range of projects that will benefit from a common platform for managing and delivering business information across the whole of our organisation through the streamlining of many business processes."

Existing and future application areas Nationwide has identified include group purchasing documentation; HR documentation and report distribution; financial report distribution from Peoplesoft Financials; board secretariat papers; mortgage case management; pension case management; all stakeholder documentation; and customer self-service through the Internet.

Columbus stores over 200 million documents from a variety of mainframe and Windows NT based business applications covering a broad range of document types from savings, ISA and mortgage statements, pay slips and tax certificates, to cheques and account signatures. Internal staff access the content stored on Columbus via Unisys e-@ction Internet Commerce Enabler.