Asset/liability management: Norwest Switches Back to Logica After Run

Norwest Corp., the $81.32 billion Milwaukee super-regional, recently forsook RMT's RADAR asset/liability management package for BankMaster PRO, from Britain's Logica PLC.

"We used BankMaster for years, and implemented RADAR about three years ago, (but) we decided to return to BankMaster, in part because BankMaster PRO runs on Windows NT," says Stephen Kaufman, a Norwest vp. "Our server has always been on NT," feeding PCs. Logica's migration to an NT environment eliminated problems in communicating with the IBM mainframe on which the old BankMaster version had run.

Norwest originally abandoned BankMaster not because it gave Kaufman headaches, but because it had been using several different systems for different jobs-BankMaster, for instance, for earnings simulations. Kaufman wanted to run all functions on one system. RADAR was chosen but, says Kaufman, was tough to implement. "We ran into a number of problems and finally got discouraged," says Kaufman. "The final straw was problems with the reliability of the software," he says. "In some cases in wouldn't run at all, or it would produce the wrong answers, and when they sent us the fix, (it) wouldn't run at all and finally we decided to just cut our ties to them."

About that time, Logica developed the new BankMaster, which roused fond memories in Kaufman of his previous association. "I'd always found them to be reliable," he says, and welcomed the prospect of running it on NT. Norwest signed a contract with Logica in early November; it uses BankMaster to manage its asset/liabilities issues bank-wide, as well as for portfolio modeling at either the individual bank or the corporation level on an end- of-month basis.

-reinbach tfn.com

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