LAS VEGAS, May 5, 1999 — At its FinNet ’99 conference, Microsoft Corp. today announced that in the past year more than 300 financial institutions worldwide have adopted the Microsoft® BackOffice® platform for administration of Internet and home banking offerings. Companies such as BancorpSouth Inc., Harris Trust & Savings Bank, Hibernia Corp., SunTrust/Crestar, Boeing Employees’ Credit Union, Savings Bank of Manchester, Westpac Banking Corp. and Industrial & Commercial Bank of China have recently implemented the Microsoft Windows NT® Server operating system, Internet Information Services (IIS) and Microsoft SQL Server
™
for their Internet banking solutions.
Driving forces behind the popularity of Windows NT, IIS and SQL Server in Internet banking include ease of use and maintenance, the number of applications spanning the financial industry, and improved transaction performance and reliability. For example, Corillian Corp.’s Voyager platform, running on Windows NT and IIS, handles an average of 75,000 transactions per day, with over 130,000 users concurrently connected.
“Internet banking has become a strategic and competitive advantage for companies that need to provide their customers with dependable, secure transactions 24 hours a day, seven days week,” said John Grispon, worldwide banking industry manager at Microsoft. “Financial institutions want a dependable solution that they can deploy quickly to immediately enhance their customers’ experience. Windows NT Server and Internet Information Services offer them a high-performance platform that will integrate and extend their existing technology.”
Internet Banking on Microsoft Platform Improves Efficiency, Customer Satisfaction
Hibernia Corp., the 68th-largest bank in the United States with $13.8 billion in assets, integrated Corillian’s Voyager platform with Translink Software’s TxAcess Server, which enabled it to leverage existing data sources and provide customers with real-time access to account information over the Internet. The Voyager platform, built on the Windows NT operating system, is designed to handle Internet-delivery banking, bill payment, brokerage and bill presentment transactions.
“By utilizing the complementary strengths of the Windows NT architecture, IIS and SQL Server, Corillian’s Voyager platform provides financial institutions like Hibernia with a compelling, cost-effective, easy-to-manage Internet banking solution,” said Ted Spooner, chairman and CEO of Corillian. “Corillian’s Voyager platform is ideal for financial institutions that need a clear Internet banking road map to meet immediate goals built on a framework that provides future functionality and application interoperability.”
Boeing Employees’ Credit Union (BECU), the fourth-largest credit union in the United States, deployed Edify Corp.’s Electronic Banking System (EBS). BECU estimates that the average cost of low-end inquiries has been reduced by 66 percent because of EBS on
Windows NT – translating into savings of more than $175,000 in the first two months EBS was online. By taking advantage of the low maintenance cost and highly scalable nature of the Microsoft Windows NT platform and SQL Server database, BECU expects the average cost of a Web transaction to come down even further as the system scales.
Headquartered in Chicago, Harris Trust & Savings Bank, the nation’s 38th-largest bank with total assets of more than $25 billion and 144 locations, recently licensed ALLTEL’s Internet banking solution. The Internet banking offering will leverage Harris’ ALLTEL service delivery infrastructure, thus allowing Harris to integrate the Internet, call center and the branch workstation operations. The system provides real-time data sharing between integrated delivery channels. The Internet solution runs on approximately five Windows NT-based servers running IIS, the Microsoft Internet Finance Server Toolkit (MIFST), Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition and SQL Server.
The winner of Microsoft’s Best Internet Banking Solution Award, nFront Inc., recently entered into an agreement to provide services for its Internet banking product, nHome, to BancorpSouth Inc., the Tupelo, Miss.-based bank with $5.6 billion in assets, operating 167 banking offices in Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama. NFront has signed more than 125 agreements with financial institutions planning to implement their Internet banking solutions to run on the Microsoft platform. Currently, over 90 of those banking sites are live.
“BancorpSouth Internet banking customers have noticed an immediate improvement in ease of use and functionality,” said Harry Baxter, BancorpSouth’s vice chairman. “The solution we have implemented based on Microsoft Windows NT Server and BackOffice delivers the security we and our customers demand, along with the robustness that is essential in such a mission-critical solution.” More than 70 ISVs have announced support for Windows NT-based solutions in the financial services customer segment.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software for personal computers. The company offers a wide range of products and services for business and
personal use, each designed with the mission of making it easier and more enjoyable for people to take advantage of the full power of personal computing every day.
Microsoft, BackOffice and Windows NT are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.
Other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
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