Allied Bank acquires networking solutions

"Customer service and availability can make or break a bank’s reputation," Guiseppe Borden, network administrator of Allied Bank said. "That is why when we suddenly found our network struggling to cope with high levels of traffic from both our employees and clients, we figured that it’s high time we install a high-performing network that would enable us to maintain our competitive lead without a heavy burden to our bottom line."

"Thanks to Procurve, we now have a reliable network that’s very secure, flexible and scaleable enough to ensure our growth into the foreseeable future. We could not have hoped for more," Borden said in a press statement.

Allied Bank started its operations with just 26 branches in 1977. Fourteen years later, it expanded to 100 nationwide before finally reaching 290 branches throughout the world including Australia, Bahrain, Thailand, China and Japan.

It was one of first Filipino banks to spearhead the launch of BancNet, a shared ATM consortium with nine other bank that offered greater ATM convenience for customers while strengthening the bank’s foothold in the Filipino overseas workers’ remittance market by expanding services in Europe and the Middle East.

Today, Allied Bank’s headquarters and 286 branch offices throughout the country, as well as their clients, are now connected to the bank’s central network. As such, the network supports over 1,500 daily users and is expected to perform at a high standard on a 24/7 basis.

According to Borden, Allied Bank’s branches and their clients are completely dependent on the network for their various transactions. Thus, any downtime or network congestion would be totally unacceptable. And since their old network was plagued with difficulties, the bank’s branches experienced endless problems connecting to the main server as a result of the high number of users. Worse, the network connections were often sluggish and prone to crashing completely.

"In the IT department, we were being bombarded with complaints about the network’s poor performance," relates Borden. "We were told that it was taking too long for the branches to hook ont the network and, once on it, the speeds were intolerable to work with."

To remedy the problem, Borden’s group began to review the existing network. Their goal was to be able to help increase employee productivity, deliver all required information on time and sustain all end-users’ connections without affecting the bank’s network, speed, and performance services.