IPACS helped with informatization construction of Zhejiang RCC
With strong support from leaders at all levels of Zhejiang RCC for the new generation integrated business system project, technical and business taff of IPACS and Zhejiang RCC have joined forces and worked together, contributing their hard work for over 10 months to the successful online operation at the beginning of December, 2006.
Project background
ZhejiangProvince is one of the provinces with the most developed coastal economy in Southeast China and has a lot of active civil-run economic groups, covering not only big cities, but also extensively distributed in small and medium cities and rural towns. Zhejiang RCC is a leading provincial RCC in asset size in China, governing 11 cities, and 81 credit cooperatives and cooperative banks. By the end of Jun. 2004, there werr 4,060 service outlets and 4,766 service stations in the province. The drastic growth of the total economic volume has continually increased the demand of customers for financial services. During the last few years, various businesses of Zhejiang RCC have developed rapidly, business volume and business categories have kept increasing. The original information system has played an important role in promotiong the development of Zhejiang RCC, but in face of spike in the business volume and continuous development of new businesses, the original system is gradually not able to completely meet the current demand. In order to adapt to the new situation and rapid development of business as well as fierce competition from other financial institutions, to achieve continuous development of Zhejiang RCC's informatization construction and promoting comprehensive improvement of operation and service level, Zhejiang RCC has partnered with IPACS to perform construction of new generation IT system.
User demand
The huge increase of civil-run economy has brought new demand in business volume, business categories and business models to Zhejiang RCC. Zhejiang RCC hopes to achieve customer demand orientation and rapid development of financial products through new generation integrated business system, to provide good customer service support and meet handling of large business volume; achieve good risk control and business management within RCC; and adapt to new busiens models such as market-oriented currency rates etc. and adapt to requirements of multiple supervisions in face of horizontal competition and supervision of related authorities.
Therefore, there are several requirements to be met by the system: First, the system should have sufficient flexibility while meeting all existing business of the bank, achieve quick customization of financial produts and meet requirements of market-oriented interest rates; second, the design of the system should be customer oriented with flexible accounting as the foundation and comprehensive risk control as the approach; finally, the technical architecture and software design of the system should meet the requirements of large business volume and large data volume.
Overall design concept
Adopt modern information technology approach to build stabile core business system and achieve concentrated operation and unified management of Zhejiang RCC. While covering all current business types, achieve smooth transition of business functions, and leave growth space for future business development, ensuring the overall architecture and application structure of the system can maintain the leading postion in the next few years, to achieve informatiztion of Zhejiang RCC's business and management operation:
1) The design should be considered to forward-looking, applicable, expandable, flexible, reliable, safe, maintainable and have high cost performance etc.;
2) Achieve unification of versio, data, function, operation specifications and system management through integrated business system of the whole province, and achieve concentrated control of risks on this basis;
3) Management-based, customer-oriented. Achieve customer-oriented system, the customer-oriented design concept should be reflected in the whole system.
4) Improve and expand service channels for all businesses and enhance service ability and settlement efficiency.
5) Comprehensive and perfect internal and external interfaces of the system, providing powerful integration capability of the system.
6) Quickly adapt to business development and new management requirements, the system has good expandability, which can quickly define new banking products and services and can flexibly support multi-tier accounting system.
7) Consider the relationship between the core business system and various professional systems as a whole, achieve high-level sharing of information and avoid island of information;
Overall architecture of the system:
Zhejiang RCC new generation integrated business system includes core business system, intermediate business system, channel integration system, international settlement system, credit management system, and general management information system.
The system adopts 3-tier architecture, with the provincial headquarter as the first tier, to concentratedly place almost all business hosts; the county and city level credit cooperatives as the second tier, with only general connection front-banking system to handle local special intermediate business and achieve access of bank counters etc.; the third tier is the service outlets with only various kinds of terminals for business transaction.
While meeting the foundation of integrated processing of Zhejiang RCC in the whole province, the system also meets the local special requirements of county and city level credit cooperatives. Except that the local special intermediate business is achieved on the general front-banking system at county and city level credit cooperatives, all other businesses are processed in the provincial center concentratedly.
System operation environment
1. Core accounting system: IBM iSeries
2. General front-banking system: HP 9000
3. Credit management and information management system: IBM pSeries
4. Statements management system: IBM pSeries
5. International business and foreign exchange accounting system: IBM pSeries System evaluation
Zhejiang RCC Informatization Construction Project Management Committee made the evaluation in the congratulation letter for the successful online operation of the project that: "The new generation integrated business system is an important milestone in informatization construction of rural cooperative financial system in Zhejiang Province; it plays a very important role in the popularization of Zhejiang RCC's new generation core business system and promoting the development of the rural cooperative financial system in Zhejiang Province to a faster and higher level”.
Deep into the bank's core application
As a Singapore company, IPACS has been serving China's financial customers since its entry into China, since China's RCC reform in 2003, IPACS has pursued the S + + strategy (software, solution, service) in the financial industry, and strengthened the R&D investment in the financial field, promoting the progress in poroducts and solutions, devoted to provide professional integrated services to banking customers. Especially for the core processor of all businesses of the bank-core business system products, IPACS has invested a large sum of money to develop flexible core business platform. The successful application in Zhejiang RCC this time will definitely launch the core system reform path of IPACS and customers in China's banking industry.
