Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank (ALCB) has signed a five-year managed contract for IT support services.

Under the terms of the deal IT hosting firm TietoEnator will provide 24 hour IT support to the bank's core systems, develop a new dealer point of sale solution and host the bank's Business Objects application.

‘This project supports our strategy of developing an end-to-end system for the management of asset finance contracts,’ said Martin Evans, director of business processes at ALCB.

‘The fully outsourced model will allow us to concentrate on our core business,’ said Evans.

The agreement builds on a longstanding contract with TietoEnator which runs its Instalment Credit Suite product.

The main driver for the current agreement is to bring further efficiencies to the organisation with a managed IT model.

Instalment Credit Suite supports our core business enabling us to develop bespoke asset finance products, bring new products to market quickly, react to legislative changes and cope with leasing tax reforms,’ said Dave Storey systems administration manager at Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank.

‘A fully hosted managed service will provide a first rate contract management system alongside the benefit of known, fixed IT costs for the next five years,’ said Storey.

The project will see the bank migrate from a VMS to a Unix platform creating a more integrated IT infrastructure on one of Alliance & Leicester Group’s core operating platforms.

A 24 hour hosted service will bring greater efficiencies to our operation particularly if our overnight processing should fail during the small hours of the morning,’ said Storey.

‘Round the clock monitoring of the system offers the business a crucial safety net and guarantees service excellence for our customers,’ he said.

Another benefit will be improved disaster recovery capability with the business able to recover almost immediately from a systems crash.

‘We will be able to recover from five minutes before any service failure and continuing with business as usual almost immediately rather than re-creating all files from several hours beforehand,’ said Storey.

The introduction of a new dealer point of sales system in early 2008 will provide on-line quotations and application submission for internal users, external sales staff and brokers.

The new system will replace paper based forms with electronic contract documentation, fully automated underwriting including automatic credit searching and provides straight through processing of applications and online documentation.