MeritaNordbanken, recently merged with Denmark’s Unibank Group, has implemented Midas-Kapiti International’s (MKI) Midas DBA banking solution for its international branch operations in London. The bank used the new Midas Links migration tool to speed up data transfer and conversion from its existing system.
The London branch followed Unibank’s strategy of centralised support which involves version control being managed from a central hub, and almost identical versions of the system being used at each branch location, with local reporting requirements being the only exception.
To speed up migration from the bank’s existing Ibis package and automate the transfer of data, MeritaNordbanken made use of the new Midas Links software, developed by MKI’s Luxembourg branch.
Craig Hunt, MeritaNordbanken’s head of management information systems, says the package eliminates the incidence of manual input errors, thereby reducing the time involved in system conversion. He says the migration to Midas was completed at the beginning of December on schedule.
The software enabled the bank to take a big bang approach to the conversion, says Hunt. "It allowed the branch to test and re-test the conversion method a number of times without having to go through the re-keying process, thus reducing the migration period considerably," he says. "During the preparation period period, we opened all general ledger accounts in under 13 minutes, and were able to load all commercial loans, money market loans and deposits transactions, FX trades and IRS deals in less than one hour."
He says the bank will continue to use the software in the future, for example for the pre-loading and transfer of live data into test systems for parallel runs.