In 2001, the company boards of two large European banks agreed to a merger transaction, creating a new holding group organization. The resulting company is now one of the largest financial services providers in the United Kingdom, with business interests in retail banking, commercial banking, personal finance, insurance, investment holdings, stock brokerage, and trust management. With more than 20 million customers and a wide variety of financial products and services, the merger created collective expertise and scale to challenge the world’s largest financial services companies.

During the course of its merger transaction, the company was confronted with relocating and implementing £8 million worth of disparate IT equipment. To make matters worse, the IT group also needed to support the increased workload and demands of a much larger organization with a greater number of business users. To satisfy these requirements, they sought a new output management solution that could leverage its existing dissimilar IT environment while at the same time supporting and improving the existing output process.

The company selected the Solimar® Print/Director system to help solve its output integration and management challenges. The Solimar Print/Director connects and manages all production printing by receiving Metacode data from the mainframe via TCP/IP and driving two channel connected, high volume Xerox 4090 printers. The legacy Xerox LCDS/Metacode data streams are converted to PostScript by Print/Director’s XCHANGE::PostScript transform module, then automatically routed to the appropriate non-production Xerox DP65 and distributed HP desktop printers. In addition, the company eliminated the print and distribution costs for some of its LCDS legacy data streams, which are now converted to viewable PDF files and automatically split, separated, and electronically distributed to the appropriate department using highly sophisticated criteria-based rules.

As a result of installing and implementing the Solimar Print/Director solution, the new organization can now easily print and automatically distribute a variety of document types to the appropriate output device, including the printing and viewing of customer letters, correspondence, statements, and internal reports. Moreover, they clearly understand the value of the Solimar Print/Director product and what it has meant to their bottom line financial results. “Solimar is now part of our strategic architecture,” explains the IT Executive. “Using Solimar Print/Director significantly reduces development time…it is cost effective and operator friendly,” adds the IT Executive.

The company recognized many quantifiable benefits from the Solimar Print/Director solution including: