Today’s competitive banking landscape demands world class services while the ferocious competition stresses the need for service differentiation. Committed to service excellence, banks are now offering a wide array of innovative services that are dependent on a series of complex software applications and advanced systems to deliver real time information to staff and customers and enhance its operational efficiency. These systems and applications are hence mission critical and it is vital that the applications are accessible at all times.
However, Inherent to every technology license agreement is a level of risk. Banks are constantly in the process of preparing, preventing and recovering from incidents that may cause disruptions in their businesses. After all, the disruption of banking services can be catastrophic in terms of the businesses reputation, customer satisfaction, revenue and the brand name as a whole.
TPS holds the trust that is placed by its valued customers at the highest regard and recognizes the responsibility for ensuring a long term performance and availability of products deployed at client sites. Hence to ensure peace of mind and business continuity of mission critical services used by banks, TPS has partnered with NCC Group UK to provide protection solution of its software applications. This step has been taken as a measure to reassure the customers of TPS stability and commitment to best practice.
NCC Group, being the largest software escrow provider, protects client worldwide with the most comprehensive solution designed specifically to assist organization which are increasingly dependent on crucial assets which they do not own or control. Under the escrow agreement, the NCC group securely holds a copy of the source code on the end user’s behalf, which is released to the end user if TPS fails to meet or maintain it contractual obligations or becomes unavailable to support the application, for example through going out of business or being taken over.
Under the agreement, the customers can utilize NCC group’s most comprehensive escrow solutions which, in addition to holding the source code, verify and test the source code for readability and completeness through integrity tests, to ensure that they could be used to achieve a successful rebuild if necessary. Optionally the customers can opt for ‘Full Verification’ testing process which involves testing consultants carrying out a full build of the application with the co-operation of the software supplier and documenting the process in an audit report.
Several banks are already in the process of evaluating the escrow agreement, whereby Commercial Bank of Kuwait is the first bank to sign the NCC’ escrow services for IRIS with TPS. This agreement serve as an insurance policy to make sure that the bank can have access to the source code upon the occurrence of an agreed upon ‘Release Conditions’,for the purpose of maintenance, update and enhancement of the software.
