Irish Life and Permanent Choose IBM Software to Deliver Enhanced Services for Financial Clients

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Irish Life and Permanent, one of Ireland’s most successful financial organizations, has selected IBM software to upgrade the IT environment that supports the company’s financial services offerings and clients.

Under the project, Irish Life will implement IBM Master Data Management software and the new IBM Information Server software platform to enhance its pensions and investment offerings. Irish Life and Permanent expects the IBM software will enable a full, 360 degree view of its one million plus customer relationships, while also allowing it to better identify suitable products for its customer base.

IBM Information Server is a new, industry-first software platform that helps organizations derive more value from the complex, heterogeneous information spread across their systems. The combination of WebSphere Customer Center 7.0 and IBM Information Server offers a holistic approach that integrates data from disparate systems, manages data corruption, eliminates duplicate data and enhances semantic-based searches across multiple domains.

Unveiled by IBM in October 2006, IBM Information Server and WebSphere Customer Center 7.0 are designed to enable organizations to use information as a strategic business asset and help businesses achieve one vision across all of their business processes.

Irish Life and Permanent believe its IBM software implementation will support the company’s efforts to be the leading financial services retailer in Ireland. With a direct focus on expanding relationships with its clients, the organisation will use the software to connect together all existing customer business into a single view thus providing opportunities to deepen the customer relationship.

Transforming Irish Life to a more customer-centric view will allow the organisation to tailor products and services for customers across multiple touch points including the Internet, call-centres and various sales channels. In doing so, Irish Life expects to develop new customer insight and loyalty by creating more effective targeted sales campaigns, product packages and easier customer self-service whilst maintaining continuous records of customer transactions and service satisfaction across the business.

“Consistent and trusted customer information being available across organisational functions can improve marketing, sales, and service,” said David Macmillan, IBM Information on Demand Solutions. “We are seeing a growing need for infrastructure solutions that can integrate customer data across the enterprise. Such solutions can help increase customer acquisition and retention by improving the ability to anticipate and fulfil the needs of its customers.”

Irish Life also will take advantage of the flexibility and reuse offered by the service-oriented architecture (SOA) supported by WebSphere Customer Center 7.0 and IBM Information Server so the business can more easily deliver trusted information and consume the new services into any number of similar IT processes and systems which require that capability.

SOA allows a company’s existing technology to more closely align with business goals and fosters greater efficiencies, cost savings and productivity by removing the need to recreate IT services from scratch each and every time they are needed.

There were a number of key attributes which Irish Life used when selecting IBM for the project. “This installation will allow us to become a committed customer-centric organization,” said Aidan Halton, general manager, Finance and IT for Irish Life and Permanent. “We selected IBM based on the expertise of IBM’s software services group who demonstrated a clear understanding of the financial services industry but also a specific understanding of Irish Life’s own business challenges.”