St George Bank live with new core banking system, Celeriti
St George Bank in core banking tech upgrade
St George Bank, Sydney-based subsidiary of Westpac, is understood to have finally gone live with new core banking software, CSC’s Celeriti. The project has been underway since 2010.
Eventually, Celeriti will be implemented at Westpac too, Banking Technology understands.
St George and Westpac are long-standing users of CSC’s older core system, Hogan. Celeriti is Hogan’s upgrade path (see below for more details).
St George is also a pilot site for a new major project at Westpac – the implementation of Oracle Customer Hub. Westpac’s CIO, Dave Curran, told iTnews that the Oracle work at St George started six months ago and the new hub has already been interfaced to Celeriti – in Curran’s words, “to prove we can do it”.
Westpac and Hogan
The Westpac group (including the St George Bank, Bank of Melbourne and BankSA subsidiaries) is one of the two remaining users of Hogan in Australia. The other one is ANZ.
The system is no longer developed or sold and continues to exist in maintenance mode. In 2010, CSC introduced an upgrade path for Hogan – a new wrapper around the old core, called Celeriti.
Westpac and St George were among the first takers. The project took a long time to come to fruition – with Celeriti having just gone live at St George, six years on.
Meanwhile, the legacy Hogan system has had its issues at Westpac. In 2015, St George, Bank of Melbourne and BankSA suffered a major internet banking outage.
When the systems went live a major data corruption was discovered in the mainframe database, forcing Westpac to shut their services down for most of the day as they investigated.
At the time, the Hogan system could have caused the irrecoverable loss of the transactional data of thousands of customers.
Celeriti: it’s alive!
CSC has made a number of attempts to find the way forward for Hogan.
Celeriti was brought to market in 2010 as an end-to-end suite of SOA-based enterprise software for banking, cards, payments and lending, and offered to Hogan users as part of an upgrade to newer versions of Hogan, or for progressive replacement of functionality.
However, the uptake has been less than enthusiastic. Banking Technology understands that apart from Westpac/St George in Australia, there are just two more takers of Celeriti. Both are in the US: First Tennessee Bank and Pentagon Federal Credit Union.
By 2013, CSC decided that SAP’s payments and core banking software would be an upgrade path for the Hogan users. The tie-up was announced in spring 2013, extended to a cloud-related partnership a year later – Hogan users in the US were offered a move to a cloud-based SAP for Banking platform hosted by CSC – but no tangible results have transpired so far. The venture seems to have gone into a dormant mode.
In 2015, CSC turned its attention back to Celeriti. It teamed up with India-based HCL Technologies to set up to create a banking software and services joint venture.
CSC would provide core banking, cards, payments, and software and product development. HCL would provide capital investment, application implementation, and banking sales experience.
The results of this collaboration are yet to be unveiled.
