BCEN-Eurobank faced challenges common to all banks today: from an IT viewpoint, the pressure on margins, cost reduction and replacing difficult-to-maintain in-house systems; from a business viewpoint, new accounting standards and critical regulatory requirements such as Basel II. The latter adds pressure for banks to upgrade systems and improve controls. In particular, BCEN-Eurobank is based in France where the regulatory environment has intensified of late. BCEN-Eurobank sought a solution to improve its overall business controls and improve its ability to prepare for compliance to Basel II.

"We selected Financial Objects' IBIS S2 banking system because it is both reliable and highly secure, and our internal users chose it for its ease of use and flexibility compared to other competitive solutions," said the IT Managers of BCEN-Eurobank. "By implementing IBIS S2 as the main banking platform, we have improved our overall business controls in terms of greater automation and risk management, and the ability to prepare ourselves for compliance to Basel II. As a result, we now provide better customer service to our clients."

BCEN-Eurobank began migrating from Financial Objects' original IBIS system to IBIS S2 in June 2004 and completed the migration by September 2005. As well as the IBIS S2 upgrade and the installation of new software modules (including Documentary Credits), Financial Objects was also involved in other significant bespoke enhancements and projects as BCEN-Eurobank had developed various in-house software add-ons around the existing core IBIS functionality. These presented an overhead in terms of day-to-day maintenance and upgrades, therefore Financial Objects integrated all in-house developments into IBIS S2 and now provides support for the entire system.

"The international and wholesale banking systems market has traditionally been characterised by large highly functional packages running on host-based computer systems," said David Carruthers, managing director of the IBIS Division at Financial Objects. "IBIS S2, however, provides breadth and depth of functionality and great integration capacities with other leading software solutions available on the market. BCEN-Eurobank is one of Financial Objects' largest projects to date and its success proves that IBIS S2 can answer to banks' needs in a tailored manner."

IBIS S2 delivers full front to back office international banking functionality on a three tier platform employing IBM iSeries as the transaction processing engine, combined with in-depth business functionality and Microsoft technology. The three tier platform approach enables custom applications to be developed to specific user requirements.