"The Bank that cares"

Bank of India is an Indian bank providing banking services for corporate, medium and small business, mass market and rural markets globally. Started in 1906 with a paid-up capital of US$115,000, it has become one of the country's largest commercial banks with assets exceeding US$71 billion in 2003.

As its trademark slogan states, the bank has been serving as "the Bank that cares" for Indian entrepreneurs and companies whose businesses are rapidly expanding in India and beyond. Bank of India is the first Indian bank breaking into the international market by opening its London Branch in 1946. In 1951 it set up the Bank of India Singapore which became the regional hub in Asia. Since then, the bank's operations quickly spread across UK, Asia, Africa, Europe and North America.

An IT pioneer in the banking industry

The Bank of India has taken a trailblazing approach to innovation. In India, it was the first bank to establish a fully computerized branch and ATM facility at its Mahalaxmi branch in Mumbai in 1989. It was also a founding member of SWIFT in the country, and had pioneered the introduction of a system for evaluating/rating its credit portfolio.

Building a seamless global network to support the growing international business

Bank of India has sizable presence outside of India with 23 branches/offices across 12 countries. International business accounts for around 20% of the bank's total revenue. More growth is expected in this sector as a result of the blooming Indian economy and the country's dynamic entrepreneurs, who are increasingly doing more business abroad.

In 2003, the bank decided to transform its Singapore hub into a global one to support its growing international operations. As part of the plan, central processing facilities of transactions from various foreign branches will be handled by the Singapore branch.To achieve this, all the overseas branches will be connected to the Singapore hub. For the purpose of monitoring, the Head Office at Mumbai will also be connected to the Singapore hub.The move was intended to save costs and improve information management.

The challenge to integrate the bank's networks was complex.The old set-up was mostly point-to-point and managed by various service providers.The consolidation also needed to happen quickly and with zero interruption to normal business.

For this task, Bank of India selected the powerful partnership of AT&T and IBM.The two companies collaborated seamlessly to deliver true end-to-end services to Bank of India.

AT&T was responsible for building Bank of India's global network backbone, which was based on AT&T's End-to-End International Private Line Service.

AT&T End-to-End International Private Line is a digital network service that provides the transmission path for private digital data lines and supports simultaneous, two-way transmission of voice, data, video, or any signal that can be encoded digitally - in any combination - over dedicated terrestrial or satellite channels.

For security and reliability,AT&T provided the bank with a suite of managed network services from its Customer Operations Center in Singapore.The solution gave Bank of India a wide area network that offers end-to-end management of enterprise data communication networks, proactive fault detection, ongoing maintenance and round-the-clock customer support.

AT&T Customer Operations Center is ideally suited to support the rapidly growing number of Asian companies that require a global communications infrastructure that crosses continents and time zones to improve productivity and reduce time to market.

On the other hand, IBM helped installed the network and provided the consulting services. IBM brought to the deal its expertise in hardware installation, configuration and testing. Together with AT&T engineers, a "Proof of Concept" was established and implemented for the proposed LAN and WAN network design. In addition, Project Managers from IBM only liaised with AT&T's Project Manager so that Bank of India experienced a single point of contact.

Ready for new era of growth

Prior to working with AT&T and IBM, Bank of India relied on locally-provided solutions. With the new global network in place, the bank saw remarkable improvements in its productivity and operations efficiency.

"We are embarking on a major step forward and we needed a network provider that could support our applications on a robust and reliable infrastructure. Simultaneously, the management of this complex network has to be as user-friendly as possible," said Mr. D. Krishnamurthy, General Manager, Information Technology Dept., Head Office, Bank of India.

"We anticipate this service will allow Bank of India to benefit from significant savings in network maintenance, while increasing Productivity and raising the volume of transactions. More importantly, we expect greater peace of mind with enhanced security, improved reliability and support from a single platform and a truly global network provider."

With this foundation in place, the Bank of India is all set to a new era of global banking innovation and continues to be "the guiding star" to a new generation of dynamic entrepreneurs and companies from India.

For more information, visit the Bank of India website http://www.bankofindia.com or download the Bank of India casestudy in PDF format [PDF: 552K]