IT Business
Yorkshire Building Society to boost online operations with Egg merger
Company describes it as an 'exciting' time for its IT team
By Anh Nguyen | Computerworld UK | Published 12:26, 25 July 11
Yorkshire Building Society, the UK’s second largest building society, will acquire the mortgage and savings business of Citigroup’s Egg Banking, a move that will prompt major in-house IT development.
The acquisition comprises a £2.5 billion savings book and a £430 million mortgage book, as well as the Egg brand.
Also in this channel
Virtualisation, Big Data and BYOD
Check out our Business IT Hub for opinions and briefings. Read more
“It’s a very exciting time for our IT team. Most of Egg’s accounts are online and it’s an area Yorkshire has invested in, in recent years,” a spokesperson for Yorkshire Building Society said.
For 12 months after completion of the acquisition, Yorkshire Building Society will effectively outsource the Egg mortgage and savings business back to Citigroup, while its in-house IT team develops and replicates the additional online functions that Egg’s platform currently provides.
Once the online functions have been developed for Yorkshire Building Society, customers will then be migrated in-house onto a single platform that will provide Yorkshire and Egg functionalities.
“It will be a seamless service for customers,” the spokesperson added.
So far, the innovative in-house systems that Yorkshire has developed for its savings business includes a system that provides an electronic date stamp signature on online savings applications. This means that the whole application can be done online because application forms don’t have to be printed off, signed and sent off to the bank.
Meanwhile, the additional Egg functionalities that Yorkshire’s IT team will be working on include developing a secure messaging facility, to allow customers to correspond with the bank via a secure platform. They will also develop systems for automated telephone transactions, SMS messaging and a money management system to enable customers to access and view all their financial holdings with the bank in one place.
Yorkshire Building Society has around 2.6 million members, 178 branches and assets of more than £30 billion. It uses SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence software and an Oracle data warehouse.
Its recent mergers have included Barnsley Building society in December 2008 and Chelsea Building Society in April last year. The building society is also merging with Norwich & Peterborough Building Society, which is expected to complete on 1 November 2011.
