The Bank of St Helena based in the middle of the South Atlantic has recently upgraded to iFinancial's BankWare.NET core banking system.
Previously a BankWare client, the bank is primarily a retail banking operation offering a full cashier's service to the island's inhabitants and an extensive range of savings and lending products. The upgrade was not only for the branch in St Helena but also included the Ascension Island Branch.
As a result of the distance, and difficulties, of getting to St Helena and the Ascension Islands the implementation plan was somewhat complicated. Initially the bank's staff came to IFinancial's offices in London for training in BankWare.net. Their data was automatically converted and they did test implementations and pseudo-parallel running at iFinancial's offices. Once the bank's staff were familiar, competent and confident in the new technology they returned to St Helena to begin the transition to the new technology platform.
Support for installation, throughout the whole of the volume testing and parallel running phases of the project was provided remotely from iFinancial's London office.
Rosie Bargo, Managing Director of Bank of St Helena , said "Because of the remoteness of St Helena and the difficulties in getting here nothing is ever quite straightforward. However, the iFinancial team gave us great confidence that we would be able to do what we did in the way that we did it and were on hand to support us each step of the way. We see this technological change as a major step forward for the bank and it lays the groundwork for us to provide even more sophisticated banking services to our customer base both onshore and around the world. There are some interesting challenges ahead and we embrace them."