SYDNEY - The ANZ Bank has cancelled an ambitious overhaul of its core ATM banking system after concluding that the shift was not worth the cost and disruption involved.
According to a report in the Australian Financial Review, the system was to be one of the first in the world to use Microsoft's Windows operating system in a large scale implementation for ATM and point-of-sale transactions.
The decision halts a three-year effort to create a new transaction network in hopes of cutting its hardware and networking costs.
Bank executives said they planned to close the so-called Next Generation Switching (NGS) project at the end of April and return all EFT transactions to the bank's older technology.
According to the Financial Review, the reversal is indicative of new chief information officer Mike Grimes' approach to IT projects at a time when the bank faces integration issues associated with its 2003 purchase of National Bank of New Zealand.
Bank employees were told on April 12 that the integration of the ANZ and NBNZ systems would lead to "unnecessary risks" if there was a shift to the new switching system, according to the Financial Review.
Launched in 2001, the NGS effort had proved tougher than expected. About 60 of the bank's ATMs currently use the system, which is based on OpeN/2 software from S2 running on Microsoft's Windows Server 2000.
Grimes said the bank could have made the system work, had received "magnificent" support from S2 and was happy with the Microsoft software.
"This was a technical struggle in the early and middle stages of the project, and we were very much pioneering with Microsoft and S2 ... but I think we'd overcome the technical difficulties of this," he said.
Grimes said the main factor behind the cancellation was the prospect of a two-stage upgrade to get the New Zealand network into line with the Australian network and then upgrade to the new system.
"It didn't take a rocket scientist to arrive at the fact that we ought to go back to a more basic solution given the importance of integration," he said.
Hewlett-Packard is a winner in the deal; the bank will stay with HP's non-stop Tandem mainframe systems until at least 2006. Other systems at the bank continue to use Windows.
