Bradford & Bingley has extended a managed services agreement with IBM to cover the outsourcing of all its IT infrastructure, including application development and maintenance.
A key part of the agreement will be the development of a Rapid Application Centre in Bingley to provide the UK financial services group with a faster route to market for new products and services.
The deal also includes end-to-end systems development and maintenance, managing mainframe, desktop and midrange systems, database administration, help desk services and data centre operations.
As part of the agreement 170 Bradford & Bingley staff will be transferring to IBM. This follows on from the 42 employees who transferred to IBM in 1998.
Steven Crawshaw, group strategy HR and IT director of Bradford & Bingley Group, says: "The IBM deal gives us business flexibility and access, as needed, to IBM's resources and leading technology to meet our fast changing business needs."