Irish network services company Lan Communications has scooped a €330,000 contract with Ulster Bank to roll out a voice system, trader dealer board, call recording system and technical support.
“The time-sensitive nature of capital markets demands robust and resilient voice technology,” explained Eduard van Dreumel, head of corporate markets IT, Ulster Bank.
“Having real-time trading data coupled with reliable yet flexible voice communications underpins our entire business model,” van Dreumel said. “We have complete confidence in the technology deployed to deliver high -vailability voice and data services to the team and provide the scalability our business requires to expand and grow.”
The project stems from a premises move by the capital markets division to George’s Quay in the IFSC in Dublin. Due to the critical nature of voice technology, Ulster Bank took the decision not to move the existing dealer board but rather to install a new one at headquarters.
“We built ahead to avoid any downtime or disruption to Ulster Bank’s business,” said Alan Bothwell, senior account manager, Lan Communications. “We installed a second Meridian Option 11 voice system on loan for them and ran two parallel systems at one stage to keep the business running.
“This approach had the added benefit of allowing us to test everything fully before going live,” he added.
Ulster Bank’s existing voice system based on Nortel’s Meridian platform was upgraded to Nortel Communication Server 1000 running the latest software release.
By IP-enabling its voice infrastructure, Ulster Bank can choose optional contact centre capabilities such as unified messaging, interactive voice response and web integration if the company decides to migrate to a full IP-based solution at some later stage.
The dealer board system is based on the BT Syntegra p51 platform. Capable of supporting up to 192 users and 1,000 lines, it provides Ulster Bank with plenty of scope for future expansion.
Comprising a number of fully digital and highly fault-tolerant modules, the platform can be configured to provide flexible connections to the voice recording system, an element which, according to Eduard van Dreumel, is critical for capital markets.
“We record every single transaction and often have to retrieve calls to check rate agreements, for example,” said van Dreumel. “The call logging system based on the Nice platform is completely reliable and flexible and enables us to search the NiceLog System for recorded calls according to search criteria that we define.”
By John Kennedy
