Jih Sun, a retail bank in Taiwan, is reducing time-to-market for new products and better managing customer accounts through its newly implemented Temenos T24 modular core banking system. The bank is running Temenos T24 on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 to support 2.4 million accounts and 1.4 million customers across 49 branches.

Jih Sun’s CIO, Tom Ko, said that the Microsoft support was key to the system’s selection as the Microsoft technology would allow the bank to contain costs, scale easily, improve productivity and allow users to work with a familiar interface in the new system.

“A key requirement for us was to lower our total cost of ownership. That Temenos T24 supports the Microsoft platform was completely strategic to our business,” Ko said. “We now have a tailored core banking system that can support huge transaction volumes, and running on our preferred choice of operating system. We’ve also decided to install treasury and trade finance functionality to replace local systems – furthering consolidating our processes within a single integrated system.”

Jih Sun installed Temenos T24 on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 with Unisys hardware. The bank went live with the system in October. Using Microsoft Windows Server 2003 is enabling Jih Sun to achieve cost savings and increased productivity from its Temenos T24 implementation as bank employees can focus attention on activities that provide a greater return to the business. By using hardware supplied by Unisys, Jih Sun can also take advantage of a higher availability of resources to maintain their chosen platform.

Jih Sun tapped Temenos T24 to replace a locally developed mainframe system, which was costly to upgrade, modify and customize. During the implementation of Temenos T24, Temenos carried out significant development work to ensure the system met the bank’s requirements, including local needs such as typhoon day processing capabilities. Typhoon day processing is a specific local requirement: When the climate becomes very bad, the government may suddenly announce that there will be no work the next day. Therefore, the system status has to be changed immediately. Sometimes, parts of the branches still have to work in that day, so at that moment the system has to perform special controls and matches to the business.

Thanks to the layered architecture of the system, Temenos was also able to provide user interfaces in the local traditional Chinese language, Mandarin. Temenos provided core functionality, including daily accruals, collateral management and multi-book components.