The bank can now better respond to the local market's needs with greater product innovation. It can also deliver these new products to market quickly, without any additional software capital expenditure.

TEMENOS T24, the company's modular core banking system, supports approximately 270,000 customer accounts and some 140,000 transactions per day across 208 branches. The bank is now implementing TEMENOS T24 to replace its retail banking systems to support a further eight million accounts.

Jiang Hong, CIO, Bank of Shanghai, says: "With TEMENOS T24, we have essentially future-proofed our business. We are the first and foremost bank to implement such a package in China to support broad business operations, so are now in an exceptional position. By utilising the best technology to support our production innovation, we can secure a significant strategic advantage for the years to come."

By delivering greater automation and STP capabilities, TEMENOS T24 gives the Bank of Shanghai additional cost advantages against other players. Also, the system allows the bank to monitor its exposure online across multiple customers through a customer-centric view, as well as strengthen its management of both credit and operational risk. Previously, the bank was operating on a number of separate proprietary systems. However, these had limited functionality, such as only offering an account view of the business. The bank considered a number of local vendors as well as many open systems-based international packages.

TEMENOS implemented all TEMENOS T24 modules, including corporate banking, treasury and trade finance, and corporate deposits and lending. In addition, TEMENOS provided over 20 bespoke interfaces to government institutions, agencies and municipalities, encompassing internet banking, general ledger and legislative reporting. The bank installed TEMENOS T24 using Oracle database software on HP servers.

TEMENOS T24 is a functionally rich, thin client, scalable, integrated, modular banking system. It is built on an open architecture, and uses established standards such as HTTP, XML and J2EE. It offers a single client view across the enterprise and multiple application server support. The system can support large numbers of users with true non-stop resilience.

Andreas Andreades, CEO, TEMENOS, adds: "As part of the project, we developed a customised version of TEMENOS T24 to address specific Chinese banking practices. The Bank of Shanghai is the first to benefit from this, strengthening its offering and opening up further opportunities in the region. We can now offer this unique system to the rapidly growing Chinese market as a pre-packaged product."

According to the latest International Banking Systems sales league table, published in March 2006, TEMENOS has the largest core banking client base in the world with a stated 600 live sites. The company continues to attract global tier 1 and regional banks as a result of its superior products, TEMENOS T24 and TEMENOS COREBANKING.