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eXii - A unique system designed for business change

The challenge

Teachers Provident Society faced a number of challenges often found In the Financial Services sector – a focus on customer relationships frustrated by product-oriented systems, innovative product ideas held up by software development, new alliances foundering on incompatible systems. All against a backdrop of margins under attack from competitors and legislators.

If the challenges were common, the solution was anything but. Teachers' vision was to create and market a new kind of financial services system – eXii.

eXii's concept was a generic framework for all financial services with the customer at its core. It would be built on a low-cost, scalable architecture and able to encapsulate legacy services alongside its own business-oriented functions. Most challenging of all, it would support organisational change flexibly and simply.

The solution

Teachers selected IPL as its software partner to design and implement eXii.

To provide maximum scalability and flexibility of deployment, IPL designed and constructed eXii as a true three-tier client-server system with a basic operating environment of Windows NT, 2000 or later.

Transaction-server based data access and business logic components support separate presentation layers, both for customers via the web and for office-based users via a standard PC.

The eXii web solution is also designed for maximum flexibility. A configurable framework allowing access to core business functions has been developed, allowing organisations to easily and quickly integrate these functions with their existing web pages.

As for data, eXii was designed around a single logical database with the customer entity central to all sub-schemas.

eXii remodels the financial services domain from the perspective of business functions not products. By questioning some basic assumptions, much of what has traditionally been treated as product specific functionality is abstracted in eXii to common business components.

The result is a collection of configurable, business-oriented components each providing well-defined services to its peers.

By partitioning financial services along business function rather than product lines, new types of products and changes in business organisation can now be accommodated without software change.

The highlights

Together, IPL and Teachers have delivered a radically new type of system capable of helping organisations meet the challenges of the 1% world.

All the core components have been implemented with such success that Teachers are now looking to market eXii to a much wider audience.

Not only is the system extremely flexible, it is also highly scalable and can support hundreds of simultaneous users across multiple sites, and store the details of millions of customers.

The first component to be implemented has now been in operation for 5 years during which time less than 20 man days of effort have been spent fixing software errors.