Customers solicited by Virgin's online offering

Virgin's financial arm, Virgin Direct, will this week offer its 25,000 One account banking and mortgage customers direct access to their finances over the Internet.

The service, called Direct Online, allows users to manage all finances including investments and pensions on the site, a feature Virgin claims is not offered by any of its rivals.

Kevin Revell, Virgin One's IT director, said the service is the first application designed to handle portfolio management rather than purely online banking.

"It also has a technical design such that it's layered on top of the existing Virgin Direct infrastructure, so it will be easy to move very quickly and consistently towards new channels in the future," Revell said.

He added that these will include non-PC based Internet access devices including WAP-enabled mobile phones.

Virgin has selected Web site infrastructure company, Entranet, as a main supplier.

Dharmesh Mistry, Entranet chief technology officer, said his company's products are component-based which means users can select the technology they need without getting unwanted add-ons.

"The Entranet Financial Suite (eFS) is 20 to 30 per cent of the cost of ebusiness products supplied by larger vendors like IBM. A lot of vendors try to justify high prices by adding superfluous features."

Mistry also pointed out that eFS is Java-based providing easier installation with legacy systems.

According to Adrian Web, another spokesman for Virgin Direct, the www.virgin-direct.co.uk service will be offered only to the company's 25,000 Virgin One banking customers at first. It will then be rolled out across the wider 250,000 Virgin Direct customer base over the next 12 months.

"We simply can't handle the logistics of offering the service straight away to all 250,000 members - we don't want to end up with it crashing under the strain," he said.

The service can be found at http://www.virgin-direct.co.uk .