Founded in 1996, Länsförsäkringar Bank
quickly became one of Sweden's largest
banks by offering banking services primarily
to the 3.9 million insurance customers of
the Länsförsäkringar Alliance, comprised
of 23 customer-owned regional insurance
companies also providing non-life insurance,
accident and medical insurance, life assurance,
pension saving plans, and fund savings plans.
By 2008, it was clear that Länsförsäkringar
Bank would eventually need to upgrade its
core banking system. The major objective was
to secure future business, meeting customers’
evolving expectations and high growth
ambitions. The built-in system complexity was
increasing due to enforced unique customer
development and functional and technical
limitations leading to unsatisfying flexibility
and time to market. The bank’s system had
to go offline each night for batch processing,
an archaic requirement in the 24/7 digital
world. Furthermore, the legacy platform
was not built to handle integrations with the
broader Swedish and European payments
ecosystem, which was steadily becoming
more integrated.
Over several years, the bank continued to
observe the core banking marketplace and saw
how the different solutions evolved. “We could
identify the problem and mobilize before the
situation was acute and hence we had the time
to choose the right solution, prepare well and
make the organization aware of the coming
change,” says Rikard Lundberg, Core Banking
Director, Länsförsäkringar Bank.
In 2015, the timing was right for the bank to
proceed with an extensive vendor search.
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