Raiffeisen Informatik moves to INCENTAGE-SWIFT solution

RZB expects significant cost savings from migration

Published on 18 September 2008
Left to right: Michael Formann, Head of Austria/Central & Eastern Europe, SWIFT. Johann Wimmer, Senior Vice President,Raffeisen Informatik GmbH. Judith Baracs, Senior Account Director, Austria & Central Europe. Günther Gall, Head of Division Transaction Services, Raiffeisen Zentralbank Osterrecih AG. Felix Huber, CEO, Incentage AG. Roberto Olivieri, Vice President, INCENTAGE AG. Christian Sarafidis, Head of Sales Services, Europe Middle East & Africa, SWIFT
 
Raiffeisen Informatik (R-IT), the centralised hub serving 35 members of Austrian banking group rZB, as well as several private banks in Austria, has decided to replace its current infrastructure with a joint INCENTAGE-SWIFT solution.

The solution combines middleware from technology firm INCENTAGE and SWIFT’s Alliance Access interface. The combination provides a user-friendly and customised graphical user interface to thousands of internal users. It will also will allow the easy adoption of current and new standards and workflows, including SEPA and exceptions and investigations, and offers a short time to market.

The change will allow Raiffeisen Informatik clients to easily use new standards and stay on the forefront of business requirements to serve their clients. At the same time, Raiffeisen Informatik will be able to reduce the current and future running and maintenance costs of its large infrastructure.

RrZB needs to be able to adopt new ISO standards and solutions in the coming years in an easy and cost-effective way to provide best-of-breed services to its customers,” says Günther Gall, head of Division Transaction Services, RZB. “To achieve this, we decided to renew our hub’s infrastructure. So far everything is going according to plan, and the project will result in significant short- and long-term cost savings for the whole group.”

RZB hopes to complete the infrastructure replacement project within a “challenging” timeframe of less than two years. The implementation phase started in May 2008, and in June all 35 banking and insurance companies of the RZB Group were using relationship Management Authorisation via Alliance Access. Testing will finish soon, and migration to the live environment will start in October.

“By the end of 2008 the first milestone will be reached when all financial institutions will be moved to the INCENTAGE-SWIFT solution for the authentication functionalities part,” says Johann Wimmer, Senior Vice President with responsibility for Banking and Financial Institutes Customers at Raiffeisen Informatik. “The entire transformation and simplification of the routing-logic of the SWIFT messages will be gradually achieved by the beginning of 2009. It’s going very well.”