Coventry's multi-phase ATM migration project is emblematic of a broader industry-wide initiative to modernize payments systems to meet card association mandates and reduce expenses to become more competitive. As a result, building societies have added competition in the mortgage market; net lending in 2003 was 70% higher than in 2002, according to the Building Societies Association. Coventry Building Society is a leading industry player that has consistently demonstrated its ability to provide more competitive products and services by continuously lowering its cost base. For the eighth successive year Coventry has improved their cost ratio, maintaining its position as the most cost efficient major building society in the UK.

"Our successful completion of the ATM migration project marks an important milestone for Coventry as we move forward to add more capabilities," said Giles Chipperfield, Chief Information Officer of Coventry Building Society. "At Coventry our focus is on delivering greater member value while expanding the variety of distribution channels, along with the quality of mortgage products and financial services. S2 Systems' OpeN/2 platform supports these efforts while providing greater latitude to leverage newer technologies for smart card acquiring and mobile top-up services from advanced function ATMs."

Coventry Building Society's ATM migration moved forward parallel with the successful testing of the final phase of its replacement project; this phase included implementation of two network interfaces. Coventry deployed OpeN/2 on the Sun Fire(TM) 6800 server running the Solaris 8 Operating Environment (OE) and Oracle9i Database to drive 54 NCR NDC+ ATMs that perform standard ATM balance enquiries, mini-statements, cash withdrawals, pin changes and deposits. S2 Systems' OpeN/2 solution for authorization and transaction switching has repeatedly proven itself to be agile, flexible and exceedingly resilient in a wide range of hardware, relational database and operating system environments.

"S2 Systems has demonstrated time and again that OpeN/2's architectural agility can pass muster when it comes to integration with increasingly powerful yet complex configuration scenarios," said Stephen Clark, president and CEO of S2 Systems. "Our customers agree that S2's OpeN/2 solution is the right choice to help them meet today's regulatory mandates and lay the groundwork to quickly respond to tomorrow's competitive realities. We are pleased that Coventry Building Society has successfully migrated their ATM network over to S2 Systems' OpeN/2 platform and we look forward to achieving further milestones."

SPL and S2 Systems have been working in concert to deliver and implement Coventry Building Society's chosen payment processing solution and related applications. The Yorkshire-based company's specialists in authorization and transaction switching have over 50 years of collective experience in card payments.

S2 Systems is a technology innovator with a 20-year pedigree and proven customer sites that have drawn attention from industry giants such as IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Stratus and Unisys. S2's OpeN/2 payment processing engine is the only platform in its class, engineered from the ground up, to deliver continuously reliable transaction processing services and applications that support a wide variety of payment options.