Washington-based Riggs Bank has chosen Midas-Kapiti International’s (MKI) Midas Private Banking solution to support its recently established operations in London and the Channel Islands. The bank is also the first financial institution to sign up for MKI's new Facilities Management service designed to provide Midas users with the opportunity to outsource the operational management of their hardware and banking software applications.
The Riggs' installation incorporates specialised functionality to handle relationship and portfolio management, order routing and workflow management plus transaction processing, accounting and settlement.
Riggs used MKI's Meridien middleware to link to its customer relationship management system and general ledger. The bank has also developed additional interfaces to provide automatic links to brokerages, custodians and payment services.
Wadih Hanna, managing director of Riggs International Private Bank, comments: "Our objective was to rewrite the way private banking services are delivered to high net-worth individuals, combined with a high degree of straight-through-processing and a minimum of human resource devoted to back-office processing. Our aim was to automate processes wherever possible."
The RFP also called for an outsourced solution. This has been achieved using a new Facilities Management service developed by MKI in partnership with Syan. At Riggs Bank, the five year agreement covers the management of IBM AS/400-based banking operations servers, clustered Microsoft Windows NT application servers and Citrix ‘thin client’ technology, together with a sophisticated communications network. The bank’s AS/400 will be sited at a UK-based data centre, linked by managed network to NT-based servers at the bank’s London office.
MKI says the new outsourcing facility is to be made available to Midas and Equation users generally.