PNB, BayanTel in tie-up

Philippine National Bank and Bayan Telecommunications, Inc. (BayanTel) have entered into a strategic partnership whereby the latter will expand PNB’s nationwide communications backbone facility.

The project aims to provide full communications redundancy back-up which will guarantee a full-online branch delivery system support to all PNB account holders during regular business hours in any of PNB’s 318 online domestic branches.

As a strategic partner of PNB, BayanTel will be providing 25 percent of PNB’s branches nationwide with data services that will support the following online CASA (current account, savings account system), corporate e-mail system throughout the PNB domestic and overseas network, loans update and general loan monitoring information, reports distribution system on a bankwide set-up and other services that entail the delivery of various information to depositors.

Antonio U. Limtong, PNB information technology group head, said the backbone expansion will increase the full 24-hour availability of all of PNB’s automated teller machine (ATM) terminals nationwide, thereby accommodating services for other bank. ATM cardholders connected to its network.

This, Limtong said, is of great significance to many of PNB’s provincial locations where round-the-clock ATM service is limited.

The project is made possible through BayanTel’s frame relay service which is part of a P1-billion investment in data services.

Tunde Fafunwa, BayanTel chief consultant for corporate and carrier group, explained that this high-speed access service is able to handle many types of protocols with a very high level of reliability.– Mary Ann Reyes