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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 10/13/03 issue

Net gain: NC treasury builds system to bank on

By Caron Golden, Special to GCN

To say that the state of North Carolina’s banking system was outmoded is an understatement. At age 25, it was more than overdue for an overhaul.

The “system” was actually a proliferation of manual processes and small PC subsystems. Statements and other financial inquiries had to be produced in hard copy. Double-keying data into spreadsheets and legacy systems was a requirement.

On top of that, while the Department of State Treasurer had some Internet capability, it had hardly taken advantage of the Web. And with the increase in transactions over the last decade, the systems—and the people operating them—were being pushed to the limit.

Not a healthy situation for a government organization that essentially functions like a commercial bank for all state government enterprises.

“It was old; it was archaic. It needed to be replaced,” said Don Waugh, North Carolina’s assistant state controller.

After a joint effort by the Department of State Treasurer’s Financial Operations and Information Technology divisions, a new Core Banking System went live in July, implementing the best practices of commercial banks, using a commercial product from Iflex Solutions Inc. of India.

“When Richard Moore was elected treasurer in 2000, one of the highlights of his platform was to completely automate and modernize the technology infrastructure,” said Bill Golden, deputy state treasurer and CIO, who spearheaded the two-year project. “We got an appropriation from the Legislature of just under $5 million and split the project into three phases: planning, selection and implementation.”

One of the initial issues was simply determining what was needed, Golden said. “We’re equivalent in assets to the third largest bank in the state, with $65 billion, but we have only about 500 customers and only at one branch. So, we’re big, but we’re small.

“That made finding the right solution challenging,” he said. “Some of our customers in one account will write 5 million checks in a year. So, we couldn’t get a system for a small community bank that couldn’t handle that volume of money on a small number of accounts.”

The department hired Gartner Consulting Group, a division of Gartner Inc. of Stamford, Conn., to help document its requirements and make sure that commercial banking software would meet its needs. The company helped develop a request for proposals for both the business and technical requirements, and assisted in the selection process.

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