Temenos has installed T24, its modular core banking system, in Schroders' new Private Banking Service Centre in Zurich to support the firm's UK, Guernsey and Swiss private banking subsidiaries. By replacing multiple legacy systems and minimising its system landscape, the bank has unified service levels across its subsidiaries, centralised its reporting and improved its operational performance.

Heinz Scheiwiller, Head of Schroders Private Banking Service Centre, says: "Rationalised back-office processes have become an ambition at most banks, but we've gone one step further by equipping our service centre with both multi-bank and multi-country capabilities. This is possible in part because of T24's capacity to process a single hub with multiple, cross country and cross time-zone companies so that we're running three banks from one platform".

Schroders Private Banking has operated independent installations of Globus, Temenos' original core banking system, in London and Zurich since 2003 to support its London, Guernsey and Swiss subsidiaries. However, each subsidiary had a different technical architecture and the bank also deployed a number of other applications to support areas such as order management, regulatory reporting and risk management.

After reviewing its operations in 2005, Schroders Private Banking decided to centralise its infrastructure and streamline its business. Its priorities were to bring all three country operations into a single service centre and consolidate its systems. This would reduce costs through increased efficiencies and fewer data centres with a simpler system landscape. The bank selected Temenos T24 and began centralizing its back office operations in Zurich in early 2006.

Schroders Private Banking installed the system on Sun Solaris servers in its Zurich Service Centre, which is fully operational with some 70 staff. The single platform enables each bank to take advantage of products and innovations offered by the others, strengthen a single corporate identity and make cost-justifiable interesting new improvements that each individual bank could not have initiated independently.

T24 is a functionally rich, thin client, scalable, integrated, modular banking system. It is built on open system principles, and uses established technology standards such as HTTP, XML and HTML. It offers a single client view across the enterprise and can support large numbers of users with true non-stop resilience. Its fully-integrated architecture enables it to offer a significant cost advantage compared to other competing products. It offers multiple application server support and is the only system available with no end-of-day batch processing and so can genuinely boast of providing real-time 24/7 non-stop banking.

Andreas Andreades, CEO, Temenos, adds, "Cost of ownership is a key issue for banks and Schroders Private Banking has made some impressive gains in this area. By upgrading to T24 and rolling it out across the business, the bank has a much stronger and more efficient technical infrastructure, allowing it to deliver a more competitive offering. Having already made major cost reductions, the bank is also in a position to invest in new product initiatives and share best practices across its businesses."