The Celeriti suite is designed to help both existing CSC clients and other institutions create a richer, differentiated and consistent customer experience across all delivery channels; accelerate new product introductions and changes, especially in response to new regulations; and gain better insights into their customer actions for improved decision-making.

The new suite is comprised of five products: Celeriti Customer, Celeriti Deposits, Celeriti Loans, Celeriti Cards and Celeriti Merchant. These offerings are available to banks and other financial institutions that don't already use CSC's software, and to current clients considering entirely new systems. These products incorporate major new capabilities that can also be delivered as new licensed components to existing clients. The major new capabilities are a Web portal user interface, service-oriented architecture (SOA) business processes and Web services, business intelligence and data warehouse, business rules and parameters, and distributed platform architecture. The new components add functionality and provide CSC's existing Hogan and CAMS II licensees with a path to incrementally modernize their IT environments.

"TowerGroup believes that financial services institutions (FSIs) will succeed only if they are able to improve their ability to respond to customer needs in real time or near real time, through whichever channel the customer prefers to use," said Jim Eckenrode, research executive for banking at TowerGroup, a research and advisory services firm focusing on financial services. "This starts with modernization at the back end, in the legacy systems. FSIs need to modernize systems to allow for more creative and rapid development of new products, analytics to manage pricing and risk, investments in channel technologies to emphasize a consistent look and feel and better usability, and event-sensing capabilities, so that when a need is identified the FSI is able to respond to it quickly."

The suite is built on CSC's industry experience and leverages software from CSC's Hogan Banking Systems and CAMS II Card & Merchant System, which have been the mainstay core banking and cards management solutions for more than 400 banks around the world. Maintenance and support will continue for Hogan and CAMS II, reflecting their importance to many of the world's financial institutions.

"Building on CSC's heritage of providing mission-critical core systems for the banking, cards, payments and lending industries, Celeriti will advance the IT environments of organizations of all sizes, enabling them to define and execute their custom roadmaps according to their own priorities and timescales to achieve business objectives," said John Dickson, president of CSC's Banking and Credit Services Division. "We are ready to start delivery of the new products and components today and are committed to providing the marketplace with a low-risk approach to incremental system modernization based on a scalable, componentized architecture with sophisticated and highly flexible capabilities that adapt processing quickly and easily to changing business requirements."

Celeriti is based on one globally applicable code base for banking, payments, lending, cards and merchant management - not different software products for different markets, tiers or operating platforms. The software is scalable across many platforms and presents an opportunity for considerable savings to banks with international presence that need consistent in-country processing.