Teachers Building Society selects Finastra’s Fusion Essence Cloud
UK-based Teachers Building Society (Teachers BS) has selected Finastra’s Fusion Essence Cloud core banking solution.
Teachers BS conducted a “rigorous global selection”
The new core system is deploying on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis, via Finastra’s partnership with Microsoft Azure.
Teachers BS is the first UK building society customer to deploy the Finastra solution.
Finastra says the new system will help Teachers BS process “significantly higher volumes” of mortgages, savings applications, and money transfers.
Simon Beresford, CEO at the building society, says it went through a “rigorous global selection process” but that Finastra stood out.
He praises the firm’s “commitment to responsible business and social innovation”.
“Investing in the new platform will ensure we can deliver best in class products and service to brokers and their clients.”
Teachers BS was founded in 1966 specifically to offer mortgages to teachers across England and Wales. It also offers personal and corporate savings accounts.
The society is based in Dorset and has around 11,300 members.
Anand Subbaraman, general manager for banking at Finastra, says Fusion Essence Cloud will give the Teachers BS team “the flexibility to meet ongoing customer needs when it comes to home ownership”.
He adds the mutual can “focus on business expansion while giving its customers the best digital experience”.
A bad move by Teachers BS – one its members should call out where possible. Finastra have taken an antiquated mainframe system, span up a cloud server and attempted (and failed) to force it to work. It is incapable of the most basic requirements for a core banking system, painful (and expensive!) to implement, and completely inappropriate for a building society with a balance sheet < £0.5bn. There is a reason there hasn't been a single successful implementation of it!