Catholic Syrian Bank Upgrades to CBS
By CXOtoday Staff
Mumbai, Mar 26, 2008

Catholic Syrian Bank (CSB) is one of the oldest private sector banks of Kerala with 361 branches and 1 extension counter spread across more than 14 states and 2 union territories of India. CSB has a workforce of 2800 employees, with business transactions of over Rs. 8000 crore and an NRI customer base of 30% of the overall deposits.

Need for a Solution:

CSB had been facing strong competition from other banks. That forced it to think about implementing a solution, which would help it differentiate itself in offering customers improved services, and also be scalable.

CSB had a vision to deliver quick, real time access to information and banking services to its users. But its existing TBA solution and IT infrastructure were insufficient and unreliable to handle such requirements, given its large customer base.

What CSB needed were robust and high performance servers, which could connect all its branches, support access to information by customers in real time, and raise transparency levels.

Solution:

After assessing the requirements, CSB decided to opt for a comprehensive Core Banking Solution (CBS) for strengthening centralized operations, and delivering speedy customer services.

CSB opted for MAARVEL, a CBS developed jointly by Laser Soft from Chennai and Sun Microsystems. The application runs on Oracle Database, and operates on Solaris 10 using Sun's V490 Server on a Cluster for its database, and T 2000 Niagara Server for its applications. The servers are powered by UltraSPARC T2 Chip Multi-Threading (CMT) processor, which packs up to 8 cores and up to 64 simultaneous threads onto a single chip.

Benefits:

"Given our rapid growth and aggressive goals, our existing TBA solution had its limitations in meeting customer demand in product, service, higher level of performance and flexibility," said R Venkataraman, chairman of Catholic Syrian Bank.

"Since migrating our system to Sun, not only we have the accrued benefits of increased performance and the reduced price, but also it has helped us reap the additional benefits of energy and space efficiencies. With this initiative, we will continue to provide our customers with the best of services," added Venkataraman.

The bank will also utilize Reporting/Back-up Servers and Sun Storage 6140 for data storage needs. It's a modular storage that will scale the bank's operations supported by fibre channel and SATA disk.

About the Deal:

CSB has initiated the deployment process of Core Banking solution from January 11, 2008. It will take about six months time to fully deploy the solution across all branches based in 14 States and 1 Union Territory.

"We are extremely happy to be selected as the technology infrastructure partner for CSB. This initiative is yet another milestone for the Indian banking industry, and reaffirms Sun's global leadership position as the most trusted and preferred open systems vendor in banking and financial services," said Bhaskar Pramanik, president of Sun Microsystems India.

For the solution deployment, Sun Microsystems will provide integrated hardware, firmware and operating system (OS) support for systems, data storage operating system.

SNAPSHOT

CSB is one of the oldest private sector banks from Kerala and has 361 branches and 1 Extension counter based in 14 states and 1 union territories of India. CSB has a workforce of 2800 employees, with business transactions of over Rs.8000 crore, and an NRI customer base of 30% of the overall deposits.

With the deployment of Core Banking Solution - MAARVEL, all its branches will get centrally connected, and the customers will have better access to banking facilities.

Challenges:

* CSB's existing TBA solution was inefficient to handle its large customer base spread across 361 branches in 14 States and 1 Union Territory.

* CSB needed a banking solution to connect all its branches and offer quick efficient customer services and bring transparency in its operations.

Solution:

MAARVEL - a core banking solution jointly developed by Laser Soft and Sun Microsystems

Benefits

* It allows all the branches to get centrally connected and facilitate the exchange of customer database and transaction details

* It allows better data management control and access

* It allows quicker service and better banking experience to customers


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