Abbey National enters offshore banking race

Abbey National Offshore has entered the internet offshore banking race, but is more cautious than its rivals about rolling out a full service.

Abbey National Offshore has entered the internet offshore banking race, but is more cautious than its rivals about rolling out a full service.

The offshore operation, which has its base in Jersey and branches in Gibraltar, Portugal, Hong Kong and Dubai, is developing internet banking in partnership with Total Network Solutions and Entranet.

But while Abbey National Offshore's sister company, Cahoot, has signed up around 40,000 internet account holders, Offshore says it will be much more selective. It claims it has learned from Cahoot's initial startup problems, along with those which have plagued many others. In the case of Cahoot and Halifax's IF accounts, the systems couldn't cope with demand.

Offshore is in the middle of an eight-week testing phase which has already turned up problems, for instance, when accounts are linked to certain ISPs or when older versions of internet browsers are used by customers.

Offshore product development manager, Edward Hodnett, told Network News: "We will complete more detailed testing at the end of October and early November, but we are not committing ourselves to a launch date.

"We have already learned from the mistakes of others when it comes to promising rollouts."

Initially, internet banking will only be available to customers of Offshore's new Prime account, which is opened with £5,000.

The new computer architecture used by Offshore is built around Windows NT4, which will eventually be upgraded to Windows 2000. The middleware in the system is being configured by Entranet, which also provided the creative input into the website. Total Network Solutions is the lead supplier, which has specified the system used.