Standard Bank of South Africa (SBSA) has gone live with Logica’s All Payments Solution (LAPS) - IBS Intelligence Journal article (19th April 2010). The new system delivers a central payments processing hub and a risk and liquidity management system for its large-value Swift-based payments.
The deployment, at the bank’s headquarters in Johannesburg, is part of an ongoing major payments modernisation programme. This announcement concerns the twelve-month first phase of the multi-year project, says Richard Davies, director of global payments at Logica. ‘We’ve put in the plumbing; all the infrastructure is there, the workflow is there and LAPS has taken on two different legal entities with SBSA to prove that it all works properly.’ The first part of the project covered payments out of SBSA’s branch in London as well as some applications in Johannesburg. More applications will be migrated in subsequent phases; a management consultant is currently on site, looking at phases two to five. ‘In fact we’re trying to reduce it to three phases,’ says Davies. Future work will cover the centralisation of payments data from trade finance and core banking applications as well as from other legacy solutions.
Work so far has been delivered on time and on budget with this first go-live happening in early March of this year. This was a joint effort between Logica’s professional services team and SBSA staff; Davies comments that the bank was keen to have ‘some influence’ over the development of the LAPS solution and its overall roadmap.
SBSA signed the initial contract with Logica in January 2008, following a competitive selection process. This saw Fundtech fall at the final hurdle: it is believed that Clear2Pay was rejected at an earlier stage.
SBSA’s decision to select Logica as sole provider and implementation partner was in part based on the bank’s prior favourable experience in implementing the vendor’s Continuous Linked Settlement (CLS) Manager system, comments Davies.
As a key part of this new installation, SBSA has taken the LAPS Business Activity Monitor (BAM) tool. This Business intelligence (BI)-type solution is actually a third party enterprise application, delivered by UK-based vendor, Insider Technologies.
As an integrated part of LAPS, it has been interfaced with SBSA’s internal and external systems and, using the LAPS generic workflow tool, delivers process data into a single dashboard to enable SBSA executives to monitor the bank’s entire payments flow. Executives can respond to any indications on the dashboard by drilling down into the data to the source application.
This is the first time Logica has deployed this product in this context, says Davies. So far it has only been integrated within SBSA’s payments environment.
Other ‘payments opportunities’, as part of SBSA’s modernisation programme, are currently under discussion.