Although financial service industries, from high street banks to building societies and insurance houses are gradually coming around to the idea of using open systems in one form or another, ICL’s Financial Services Division yesterday unveiled what is essentially a personal computer / MS-DOS / OfficePower / Windows / LAN Manager-based financial services retail system – Omnia Branch. Targeted in its initial guise at building societies, the application software has been put together by the firm’s Omnia-ICL division and is designed to run most customer and internal services required by a local building society branch, from within a networked personal computer environment. The system communicates with corporate-level data processing departments, databases and other external services via ICL’s branch message controller software. A partial, Windows 3-based version of Omnia-Branch – mark one – is available now, mark two, with full Windows 3 functionality is out at the end of the year. If required ICL, in conjunction with Heywood & Partners can also provide the system under Unix on its DRS 6000 box – called Omnia-NX. ICL Financial Services Division’s Roger Dale hopes that many of the elements in Omnia-Branch will be incorporated into a global financial services architecture which ICL is due to unveil later this year. ICL says one in three UK building societies are using Unix in one form or another.
