Lloyds Bank Security Services

A Global Custody Application within 10 Months

Opportunity

Lloyds Bank Securities Services is one of the leading UK custodians, providing domestic and global custody and unit trust trusteeship. Customers are corporate and institutional investors.

In October 1993 the Bank's global custody and unit trust trusteeship activities were brought into the Corporate Banking Division, reflecting the Bank's market led focus. Corporate Banking had developed a business driven approach to IT, and it was natural that Wayne Kitcat, the newly appointed Head of LBSS should extend this tradition by developing an LBSS IT department.

"We in Corporate Banking believe IT should be a part of the business and managed as such. Competitive advantage through the intelligent application of technology is a key objective."

Business Vision

Lloyds Bank wanted to re-engineer Securities Services to automate it as far as possible making manual intervention the exception rather than the rule. The application is mission-critical and involves complex business rules.

Mike Overage, Head of IT at LBSS chose the USoft Developer product to enable this vision. He puts it like this:

   "USoft Developer is the first product that, completely driven by the
   business, delivers adaptable applications"

Development Process

Lloyds Bank chose an Iterative Rapid Application Development approach based on the USoft Method, where the development team worked in partnership with the Securities Services business and IT specialists. As Mike says

   "The great thing about this technology is that you can get people
   involved. You can make changes that they can see and they get excited,
   they get enthusiastic and the great thing is that they get results."

Development started in the last quarter of '93 with USoft Developer building commencing in earnest in '94. The first pilot implementation was delivered in August '94 to a subset of LBSS installed customer base. Full rollout will occur towards the end of Q1 '95.

Results

The LBSS system is a significant financial application based on a USoft Developer server/client implementation, that includes integrated workflow management. The team developed a generic messaging system that, for example, allows them to map external message formats such as SWIFT and INS between the internal Oracle 7 database, and allows connection tot he community of information providers. There is also connection to Lloyds Bank's customer sites by a new Lloydslink application, which enables clients to communicate with LBSS via the Bank's electronic banking system.

Benefits

The Bank has positioned itself to extract considerable commercial advantage from this enabling technology. Mike says:

   "You re-engineer to create competitive advantage. If you are not
    doing this you're nowhere, and you are not going to succeed in the late
   1990's and into the next millennium"

The Bank has so far achieved significant productivity gains, Mike ascertains that he has made:

   "very substantial savings over traditional technology."

Future

Lloyds Bank Securities Services will continue to re-engineer and enhance the applications to achieve increased automation and enhanced business processes.

USoft will continue to work as a close strategic partner to enable competitive advantage within the Bank and for its customers, as these services are rolled out throughout 1995.

USoft: The Server/Client Software Company

To investigate a partnership with USoft for developing and implementing server/client solutions, call toll-free at 1-800-For-USoft, or call one of our offices.

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