Alliance & Leicester aims to ditch paper

Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank (A&LCB), the corporate banking arm of the bank, has signed a hosting agreement with TietoEnator for an application suite that manages lease arrangements for the bank's asset finance products.

The contracts are used by companies to finance the acquisition of assets, such as plant machinery or commercial vehicles.

silicon.com Financial Services

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Speaking to silicon.com, A&LCB director of lending operations Martin Evans said the bank's primary business in this area was in commercial vehicle and car leasing arrangements.

The bank already used the application suite, called Instalment Credit Suite, but hosted the software on its own servers, which it paid a third party to maintain.

The five-year deal also involves the bank upgrading to the latest version of the application suite, which Evans explained would allow it to completely remove the paper trail in the process of selling and setting up the lease contracts.

He said: "The new hosted contract will allow us to process more business with the same people. There is a strong possibility that we will be able to offer a better service to our broker and vehicle dealer partners, should they choose to adapt to the new system."

Evans said he hoped to remove paper from the process by mid-2009.