GENEVA--HP today announced customer wins across Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA) demonstrating HP's growth within the Financial Services Industry. The wins, which include both new and major incremental projects for existing finance industry customers, include; NordLB Bank Group, Luottokunta, Finland; ABN AMRO Bank, Ukraine EXIM-Bank, National Bank of Serbia and Credit Agricole Indosuez (CAI) Chevreux. HP also announced today a new initiative, called Next Generation Front Office, which enables banks to act as sales organisations to their customers and increase performance and revenue streams, while reducing costs by up to 50 percent. The initiative, which consists of a balanced set of products, services and solutions, addresses delivery of bank services at the front office -- the critical intersection where the customer meets the bank. HP enables customers in the financial services industry to enhance business processes and improve operational efficiency, delivering improved return on IT investment. HP's adaptive infrastructure is critical in enabling the industry to address regulatory mandates and dynamic business requirements, reduce complexity of applications, data and infrastructure and increasing agility. Solutions delivered to this sector range from IT infrastructure, security solutions to outsourcing contracts, services and payments. "We fully understand that customers need to achieve greater return on their IT investment. HP's expertise helps customers mitigate risks and solve complex industry problems which results in driving down costs," said Kasper Rorsted, managing director for HP Europe Middle East and Africa and senior vice president for HP's Enterprise Systems Group, EMEA. "As a result, more and more financial industry customers choose to work with HP, benefiting from increased competitive advantage, global scale and technology partnerships." "HP's solutions, with their Next Generation Front Office offering and their professional services and technology capabilities, enable banking and insurance industry companies to increase innovation in customer service, and reduce costs," said Jim Eckenrode, Vice President, Consumer Banking Research, TowerGroup. "These needs continue to be important as integration trends, driven by continued industry consolidation, and the need to achieve higher levels of efficiency and effectiveness in customer interactions, continue to impact global financial institutions today." New financial industry customer wins deploying HP solutions and services include: -- ABN AMRO Bank is one of the largest European banks and the largest foreign bank in the US and has recently chosen HP as their chosen supplier within both the Netherlands and France. -- Netherlands: ABN AMRO Bank needed to consolidate the selling of products into a single multi-channel platform, providing ABN AMRO Bank with the possibility to sell all products through all channels in a secure and uniform fashion. The IT department chose HP to provide a fixed price/time project within their Multi Channel Platform (MCP) environment. HP has consistently shown with their life-cycle approach (from functional design to operational support) to be ABN AMRO Bank's trusted partner for complex security projects, worth more than 4 million Euros in Consulting and Integration business. ABN AMRO Bank is now able to offer better service to customers, cost reduction on existing environments, better time-to-market and reduced cost for additional channels and products. -- France: ABN AMRO Bank recently chose to migrate an information system supporting many applications, among them the Evolan Report application (Evolan is a major corebanking software package, by the Sopra Group), from IBM AIX to HP-UX. The migration is a key win for HP as it represents, as far as Evolan package is concerned, the first porting of HP-UX into what was an exclusive IBM installed base. ABN AMRO's Unix server environment also required major consolidation, HP was selected for its technical expertise over IBM and Sun to supply two new Superdome servers (16 ways) in MetroCluster. This win has delivered ABN AMRO reduced project costs and reduced operational costs through better efficiency through consolidation. The deal worth over one million Euros followed a successful HP led Windows 2000 migration project for ABN AMRO France. -- Credit Agricole Indosuez (CAI) Chevreux, a brokerage subsidiary of Credit Agricole Indosuez, recently announced HP as their chosen supplier for 96 blade servers running on Linux for credit risk financial calculations. CAI wanted to reduce operational costs on this business critical domain where huge market data feed is run permanently on real time for sophisticated critical calculations, mainly VaR (Value at Risk). HP was chosen as the preferred global provider, not only because it could provide all the necessary hardware (including network switches), but also full integration services, as well as the transfer of competencies and training. HP tools like RDP ("Rapid Deployment Pack") and "Insight Manager" were key success factors in the rapid roll out of the Linux solution; RDP was validated for the whole scope of CAI servers. Beyond rapid implementation, CAI experienced real performance gains due to ProLiant blade servers running on a Linux platform, therefore increasing and leveraging the performance gains underlying an HP Linux solution, that in turn lead to significant cost savings. -- NordLB Bank Group (Germany) acquired in 2002 Lietuvos Zemes Ukio Bankas (Agricultural Bank of Lithuania), one of the leading and oldest banks in Lithuania. With this came the merger of both banks' branches in Lithuania, as well as its IT infrastructure. For NORD/LB Lietuva, the overhaul of computing infrastructure is part of a long-term strategy towards lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and standardisation of the workplace. This move is posed to minimise help desk staff and associated costs. Nord/LB Lietuva has chosen HP as the strategic partner to supply IT infrastructure solutions and replace the existing IT infrastructure for the bank's head office and all the branches across the country. This 3-year agreement has a forecasted value of 1.7 million Euros. To date HP has supplied over 700 PCs, LCD panels, monitors, over 300 printers, networking equipment and some industry standard servers, leading to a striking 1 million Euros investment in IT equipment. -- Luottokunta, Finland's leading credit institution, needed to renew its current hardware and software infrastructure to diversify its services, to enhance its service levels and to be prepared for the introduction of EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa) smart cards by the year 2005. HP was chosen to supply a Unix-based high-availability Superdome server environment, to replace its current mainframe architecture. The IT infrastructure, which requires very high availability, includes Oracle9i database and Oracle's Real Application Cluster (RAC) solution. In addition, HP Services will supply support services of the highest level, ensuring high system availability under all circumstances. By moving to a Unix-based technology, Luottokunta will achieve extremely high availability and reliability. -- Ukraine EXIM-Bank required a complete e-banking solution that would be able to better serve existing customers and extend the existing customer base. HP was awarded the contract as it provided the best solution to meet all of Ukraine EXIM-Bank's requirements. HP is delivering a complete electronic bank, multi channel integration and a security infrastructure based on HP Nimius, HP services and HP Unix platform. -- National Bank of Serbia issued a World Bank financed tender in 2002 for a new Realtime Gross Settlement (RTGS) system that would serve as a payment backbone for the Serbian Financial Industry and connect the country to the global markets. With the help of HP, the National Bank of Serbia had a fully deployed RTGS System by January 2003, after a record breaking short implementation cycle of less than six months.