Sun consortium rolls out IIB Bank’s treasury system


9 Aug 2004

IIB Bank has signed a deal whereby Sun Microsystems, Horizon and Sabeo are to roll out a full Sun-based infrastructure to support IIB’s large-scale treasury system.

The project involves the supply of hardware, software and support for the implementation of the Murex treasury system, which covers a range of products such as derivatives and commodities.

The system handles these products from the front-end pricing and deal capture process right through middle and back office processing, covering accounting, settlements and risk management.

“For a financial institution like IIB any downtime due to a systems failure would be disastrous, causing inconvenience to its customers and millions of euro in lost business,” said Donal Sheehan, account manager, Horizon Open Systems.

“IIB’s main requirement was therefore for a reliable system with high availability to guard against such a scenario. We supplied a cluster environment comprising two SunFire V880 servers with 8GB memory and four processors in each server, including a total of 2T3 disk storage providing optimum performance and peace of mind.”

IIB is a subsidiary of KBC Bank, one of the largest financial institutions in the world. Kenneth Coffey, head of IT services at IIB Bank, explained: “The Murex application is highly successful in KBC’s offices in Belgium and in other sites across Europe. However, it was necessary to get a local partner that we could trust to supply and support the infrastructure for the Murex system. Sabeo Technologies were ideal partners for us in the provision and delivery of the key infrastructure solution required for the critical Murex system.”

By John Kennedy