Furness Building Society installs core banking platform
Barrow’s Furness Building Society will use a Sopra core banking platform
Furness Building Society has chosen a mortgage and savings suite from vendor Sopra Banking Software, to act as the society’s core banking platform. The new system is intended to help the society become more flexible and develop new products, especially online products.
The project to implement the new software is intended to give the Furness a single centralised platform that will help the firm to deliver products in the shortest possible time. It is due to go live in the first quarter of 2014. The Furness will also be deploying Sopra Banking Software’s front office portal to support internet sales and servicing of products. At first, it will be applied to savings products, and will then be rolled out to cover mortgage products.
“The overriding objective of our new IT platform is to enable the society to deliver a comprehensive range of products and services to its customers and intermediaries,” said Nigel Quinton, chief executive at Furness Building Society. “We want to do this by providing a superior customer experience at the same time as improving the efficiency of the organisation.”
Furness Building Society is based in Cumbria and has 27 branches across Cumbria, Lancashire and Merseyside. Founded in 1865, the society had around £813 million in assets under management at the beginning of 2011. It is based in the town of Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria.
Several of the UK’s building societies have made changes to their core banking platforms in recent months. In September, Yorkshire Building Society signed a deal with computing firm HP to shift the building society’s core mortgage and savings application to the cloud. The deal was followed a month later by a similar agreement between Leeds Building Society and HP.
The UK’s largest building society, Nationwide, moved its core platforms onto the cloud back in March. Since then, the building society has reported an increase in customers due to the UK Payments Council’s new seven-day account switching service.
