IBM Inks $971 Million Deal To Overhaul Lloyd's Financial Network

IBM has signed a seven-year, $971 million (£500 million) contract to upgrade Lloyds TSB's networking infrastructure to take advantage of advanced business applications and solutions.

IBM will oversee the bank's implementation of a dedicated high-capacity fiber, DSL and MPLS voice and data network. One of the largest such deployments in Europe, the network will support 70,000 Voice over IP (VoIP) telephones and provide a flexible, high-bandwidth infrastructure for future applications. Ultimately, it will provide high-speed connectivity to all Lloyds TSB branches and ATMs.

The new infrastructure will be implemented out over the next 20 months and will feature a single network for voice, data and video, linked to mobile and call centre services. In addition to network cost reductions, it will allow Lloyd's TSB to deploy applications with greater bandwidth requirements than are currently available. Partners include Vtesse Networks, which will supply the high-capacity fiber network and Vanco, which will provide network integration and management services.

"The new infrastructure, which can easily support initiatives such as server consolidation or voice over IP, provides a responsive, variable-cost and on-demand communications architecture that can be aligned directly to Lloyds TSB's business structure," IBM Global Services general manager, EMEA Financial Services Sector Tony Cronin said in a statement. "Business processes that might once have been restricted by the inflexibility of the infrastructure, can now be enhanced in response to competitive or customer demands."

Lloyds TSB is a UK-based financial services groups, whose businesses provide a comprehensive range of banking and financial services to over 15 million customers in the UK and other countries.