Contracted by ComputerLand to design critical enterprise system for Eurobank EFG's new Polish operations.

Organization

In Greece, Eurobank EFG group is the leader in consumer lending and is also the largest lender to small businesses and among the largest lenders to large corporations.  In 2002 it began to expand into Central Europe, and it already ranks among the top banks in Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia. Eurobank EFG group planned to enter the banking markets of Poland in early 2006 as Polbank EFG. 

Polbank EFG contracted with ComputerLand SA, Poland's 2nd largest IT services firm, to develop and integrate the necessary IT infrastructure to support its operations. ComputerLand would leverage Eurobank EFG's existing systems, ComputerLand's proprietary banking systems, other third-party products, and coordinate the development of new necessary systems.

Problem

Given Eurobank EFG's focus on lending, access to local credit history information on individuals and firms was a critical need. In Poland, this information is collected and processed by the Polish credit reference agencies, Credit Information Office (Biuro Informacji Kredytowej S.A., "BIK") and  Interbank Business Information (Międzybankowa Informacja Gospodarcza, "MIG"). These credit bureaus aid the process of credit decision making by banks, organizations in the financial services sector related to banks, as well as by credit-granting entities in other sectors of the economy, through creating and developing tools for evaluating the financial condition of their customers. They collect, process and then share data and information products. These services are indispensable for building a highly-developed consumer market, and provided the necessary data for Eurobank EFG to conduct its lending operations.

Eurobank EFG needed to integrate its core banking systems which it utilizes across all of its European locations, with those of the Polish credit bureaus. It was a requirement of opening its branches that these systems would be in place and the information available to its credit officers.

Solution

ComputerLand contracted with Newitech to build a system, to allow the bank to make use of the most recent information credit history available. To maximize flexibility and minimize costs for Polbank EFG, the system would be developed largely as a stand-alone product that would be licensed to the bank and then included in ComputerLand and Newitech's portfolio of banking applications. The system, which became known as the Credit Information System (CIS), would serve two primary functions. Firstly, it would pass the information on the credit risk of customers directly to the credit officers and to other systems of the bank. Secondly, it would need to send constant updates of customer account information to the Polish credit reference agencies.

Newitech assembled a team that quickly gathered the detailed requirements of the system by working with Polbank EFG's IT team, the Polish credit bureaus, and Eurobank EFG's vendors’ support staff in Greece and India. The J2EE developers in the team then rapidly designed and developed a solution that integrated with the web services and data services provided by the credit reporting agencies using open source frameworks. The system was designed to be consistent with the other ComputerLand banking systems being developed or deployed for the bank. The system met high-availability (24/7/365) requirements of the bank.

During development extensive automated testing was used to test the resulting system. With the development systems with simulated data from the bank and data-service providers, Newitech was able to perform continuous quality control using tools such as JUnit for API unit testing and OpenSTA for load testing. After core implementation, detailed English documentation of the application and the exposed web services were provided for making the information to the other bank systems.

Results

Newitech deployed tested and deploy the new system to Polbank EFG's data center in the months prior to the start of operations. In April of 2006, the Athens-based banking group, Eurobank EFG, begun retail operations in Poland through its Polbank EFG subsidiary with the intention of opening 50 branches by the end of 2006. Cooperation between ComputerLand, Polbank EFG, and Newitech continue with the development of other advanced systems to support the bank.

CIS includes an application for the administration of the system as well as advanced interfaces for the banks top loan officers. The system features a local cache of information retrieved from the bureau. It connected to internal scoring algorithms (via web services and data connections) to provide comprehensive credit reports which included information from the bureaus, but also more detailed information for existing customers from the account information available within the banks own system.

The modular web services aspect of the solution, has permitted ComputerLand and Newitech to easily maintain and enhance the system for Polbank EFG and joint-market CIS to other Polish banks as a stand-alone product .

Key Technologies

• Enterprise Red Hat Linux AS
• JBoss Application Server 4
• Oracle 10g
• WebsphereMQ (part of credit reporting agency requirement)
• EJB and Hibernate
• Web services WSDL/SOAP
• JasperReports