By William Fellows
A British Telecommunications company called Eescape is promising to unleash what we figure must be a new online e-business banking service onto the UK market on November 26 for which it hopes will win millions of customers in short order. It will combine voice and online banking and is backed UK internet banking specialist and ISP Bank of Scotland, and Unisys Corp, which has invested heavily in natural language speech and integration technologies.
Managing director Steve Gandy, who built BT Conference into a $90m business in six years, is tight-lipped about the project as Bank of Scotland is in its quiet period, but said he plans to keep headcount below 30. BT owns 49%, Unisys has 25.5% and Bank of Scotland a percentage of the remainder. The company’s domain name has been registered by BT WebWorld. Bank of Scotland is well known for its Hobs online banking system which provides services such as paperless direct debit and internet access via BoSInternet which uses BT Click.
