The Royal Bank of Scotland is going to invest in the Ripple technology as part of the its transaformation plan.
The Royal Bank of Scotland is planning to invest £150 million a year in order to enhance its IT systems, following a technical problem that led to the disappearance of 600,000 transactions from customer accounts. The bank also projects to start trial of the Ripple technology, which is a part of the bank’s three-year technological transformation plan.
The announcement was made by the bank’s chief administrative officer Simon McNamara at a webinar meeting on Thursday. The recent breakdown, which resulted in the loss of millions of pounds, showed the necessity to carry out changes of the existing system.
During the presentation, he admitted the necessity to boost technology spending and improve the IT system. He noted that the RBS plans to modernize the legacy architecture and minimize supplier count. In general, the bank projects to spend £3.5 billion on improvements.
During the meeting, McNamara presented a slide deck, which demonstrated the RBS’s achievements over the last year, including remediation of single points of failure for 23 critical systems and improvement of the incident management processes. Besides, the RBS managed to reduce the number of programmes from 500 to under 200 within the last 12 months, what will help the bank to deal with possible technical issues in the future.
“Technology will on occasion fail,” McNamara said. “If and when that occurs, we need to ensure we can mask the impact on customers and recover as quickly and effectively as possible. It is important that it is handled well and competently.”
McNamara stated that in order to enhance the automated bank transfers, the bank will invest in Ripple technology, which has already been adopted by multiple financial institutions all over the world. The disruptive payment technology has been intensively studied by the bank’s four expert teams at the Technology Solutions Centres. Before presenting it to a range of stakeholders, the RBS conducted a thorough analysis of how to use the technology and integrate it with the bank’s infrastructure.
In collaboration with Dundee and Edinburgh Universities, the RBS has also explored the other crypto currencies. The small teams of 30 people, including doctors, entrepreneurs and professors, offered several new ways of using the digital currencies and supporting technologies. The winning proposals will receive a grant of £20,000 from the sponsor Design in Action for realizing their business ideas.
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