Nationwide enhances online banking with new data centre platform

Nationwide building society says it has enhanced its online banking capabilities with a new high availability data centre platform.

To ensure it could provide a full range of internet banking features, Nationwide embarked on a major transformation programme to develop an intuitive web interface and a robust data centre platform to perform back-end processing.

Nationwide partnered with Computacenter to design and deploy the data centre platform as part of the project. Computacenter was responsible for product fulfilment, configuration and implementation and ongoing infrastructure support.

The solution is based on IBM servers and VMware vSphere virtualisation, which provides a high-availability cluster with real-time replication. In the event of an incident, automatic fail-over ensures that online banking services are not disrupted.

Nationwide said better online services not only enhance Nationwide’s competitive advantage, but also minimise costs as the need for branch and telephone-based services is reduced.

"With a robust back-end we can develop and manage new internet-based banking systems that offer our customers exceptional availability and a user-friendly experience," said James Smith, Nationwide head of transformation for digital, distribution and channel applications.

Earlier this year Nationwide said it had carried out full site performance testing in a virtual environment, which enabled it to accurately model the future customer experience of its new online banking website.