2. 外语
  3. When Metro Bank, which claims to be Britain’s first new high-street bank for more than 150 years, opens its first branch in inne

When Metro Bank, which claims to be Britain’s first new high-street bank for more than 150 years, opens its first branch in inne

admin2012-05-04  63
问题     When Metro Bank, which claims to be Britain’s first new high-street bank for more than 150 years, opens its first branch in inner London, customers will notice the candy jars and water bowls for dogs. But what really sets Metro Bank apart is its state-of-the-art IT system. New customers will be able to gel their account, chequebook, debit and credit cards within 15 minutes, and all the data for each customer will be kept in one place.
    That puts Metro Bank in an enviable position. IT at many other Western banks is often a mess of homemade systems. Banks were the first to use mainframes in the 1960s; many are still using the original applications because it is risky to swap them out. Over the years more and more systems have been slapped on. Banks were often profitable enough to afford big IT teams, writing programs themselves rather than buying off the shelf.
    As a result banks tend to operate lots of different databases producing conflicting numbers. Reported numbers for the bank’s exposure were regularly billions of dollars adrift of reality, he reports, finding the source of the error was hard.
    Many banks also do not have a "single view" of their customers, which would allow them to offer tailored products or simply serve them better. Most systems are organised around accounts, not people. A customer’s data are duplicated for each account, often in slightly different formats. This is why talking to a call centre can take forever as employees laboriously switch between applications to sort things out.
    Some banks, particularly the smaller ones, outsource their IT to providers such as Fiserv or use packaged software. Vendors range from well-known names, such as Infosys and Oracle, to specialised firms such as Temenos. Firms can offer better service as a result. It takes Vietnam’s Techcombank, one of the country’s fastest-growing banks, days to launch new products. It takes weeks for foreign rivals.
    A few big banks are trying to improve. When HSBC started a huge consolidation project called " One HSBC" in 2008, it operated 55 separate systems for core banking, 24 for credit cards and 41 for Internet banking. By the end of next year, says Ken Harvey, the bank’s chief information officer, it plans to have one "gold suite" of applications implemented globally. But most bigger banks are still grappling with how to move forward, according to Martin Whybrow of IBS Intelligence, a research firm.
The passage aims to inform us that
选项 A、there are regulatory changes in big banks.
B、smaller banks do better than big banks.
C、big banks need IT reform rather badly.
D、IT system needs to be updated today.
答案C
解析 主旨题。文章开篇由英国Metro Bank先进的信息管理系统引出西方银行信息系统混乱的现状。之后指出一些小银行外包信息系统，而大银行在试图改进自己的信息系统。末段以汇丰银行为例加以说明。可见全文的主题是银行信息系统，作者想要告诉读者的信息是大银行急需解决改进信息系统的问题，他们也正在为之努力，故C为答案。
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