Flexigroup Wins Polaris IT System Top International Award

FlexiGroup Limited's ("FlexiGroup") new Polaris platform, an IT systems transformation initiative leveraging Service-oriented Architecture (SoA), has won global recognition at the inaugural iCMG Architecture Excellence Awards 2010 held in India. One of the key business services provided on the award winning Polaris platform is the fully integrated credit engine which interfaces with multiple credit bureaus for application processing and credit decisioning.

FlexiGroup was named joint winner of the Architecture Excellence Award in the category for SoA Vision for Enterprise Services. Some of the world's most renowned technology companies including IBM, SAP AG, Oracle and LG Electronics competed in this category. FlexiGroup shared the award with the Dubai Roads and Traffic Authority.

The Architecture Excellence Awards are designed to honour enterprises whose work demonstrates a combination of talent, vision and workmanship as the foundation to creating successful and enduring systems and enterprises. This year the awards attracted over 100 nominations from 21 countries.

FlexiGroup developed the platform to support the strong and continued growth of the business and to provide the future scale and flexibility needed to launch new and innovative products rapidly.

FlexiGroup IT adopted a phased development approach, commencing with the replacement of business-critical, inflexible, legacy software components. The initial release provided a new electronic document generation and delivery service which produces and delivers documents, such as contracts, in less than half the time as previously, and is capable of handling nine times the throughput.

Subsequent phases delivered replacement services for a third party legacy credit decisioning system and a paperless document management system. The new credit engine provides concurrent and faster credit application processing, delivering 80 per cent improvement in performance, richer functionality, and capacity to handle over ten times the volume of the legacy system.

FlexiGroup CEO John DeLano said the state of the art IT system provides FlexiGroup with the opportunity to compete with the world's top tier financial services firms.

"IT underpins all aspects of the financial services industry and for FlexiGroup to be backed by a world class and award winning system allows us to grow the business with great confidence. "I congratulate our IT team for all their hard work. This global recognition is a just reward for the successful execution of this cutting edge project," Mr DeLano said.

FlexiGroup Chief Information Officer Pearl Laughton said risk management and maintaining system integrity were priorities throughout the project.

"The phased implementation approach delivered incremental and tangible business benefits while allowing us to progressively replace legacy components of FlexiGroup's core business systems with the new Polaris services.

"Core components deemed inflexible, limited in scalability, or difficult and costly to support, were selected and prioritised for replacement. What we now have is a multi-country, multi-currency platform that is highly available, scalable, configurable, and enables IT to rapidly respond to FlexiGroup's business needs well into the future.

"I am privileged to work with such a talented group of IT professionals and an executive management team that strives for excellence. It is quite rewarding to have our IT transformation initiatives recognised with this international award," Ms Laughton said.

FlexiGoup markets its financial and telecommunication products under the following brands; Flexirent, EzyWay, Flexiway, Certegy Ezipay, Blink, and the newly launched FlexiCommercial, provider of vendor finance and IT equipment leasing.

For further information:
Media
Cameron Hamilton
FD Third Person T: 02 8298 6100

Notes to Editor:
FlexiGroup is a leading provider of vendor and retail point-of-sale finance and telecommunication services. Offering lease, rental, interest free and mobile broadband plans, performance has been characterised by solid, profitable growth as the company has expanded its business through acquisition, product innovation and diversification.

FlexiGroup operates in Australia, New Zealand and Ireland within a diverse range of commercial and consumer industries including: IT, electrical appliance, telecommunications, home improvement, solar systems, medical, furnishings and travel.

Key to FlexiGroup's success are the long standing relationships developed with a number of successful retailers. FlexiGroup has a distribution network of approximately 11,000 active retailers. Key retailers include Harvey Norman, Noel Leeming, Apple Resellers, Midas, Modern Group, The Good Guys, and Bing Lee together with more recent vendor partnerships with Comscentre and M2.