Source: IBM
The BCP Group, Portugal's largest financial group, and IBM have signed a 37 million euro extension to an agreement to manage the Information Technology infrastructure of Bank Millennium, owned by BCP Group in Poland.
In December 2005, BCP and IBM signed a 10-year contract worth more than 110 million euro, which is expected to reduce the bank's infrastructure costs by 25%.
BCP Group has 2.8 million clients in Portugal and operations in Europe and has recently been at the forefront of technological innovation in the retail banking industry.
The agreement with Millennium Bank includes management of the Polish bank's, iSeries, Wintel and Unix central systems and upgrading data centre operations, security and disaster recovery services, protecting the bank's business from possible interruptions.
The project is part of Banco Comercial Português Group's strategy to increase its global efficiency by centralising and streamlining connections with the group's international IT networks supporting operations across Portugal, Greece and Poland.
This follows a strategic decision by the bank to provide greater flexibility to quickly respond to business challenges and scale services up or down according to demand, while saving on IT costs. The core agreement includes a significant part of the technology infrastructure of Millennium bcp in Portugal and NovaBank in Greece, and now Bank Millennium in Poland, as well. A second IT centre is to be established in Lisbon.