Abbey CIO says "adios" to high street bank

Abbey's CIO is set to leave the high street bank as part of the restructuring following the £8.5bn takeover by Spanish bank Santander Central Hispano (SCH) last year.

Bill Gibbons, CIO at Abbey and regular contributor to silicon.com's CIO Jury user panel, confirmed that he will be leaving the company at the end of March.

SCH recently announced that 335 IT jobs at Abbey will be cut as it restructures the IT operations of the merged group. That followed group IT director Yasmin Jetha being made redundant at the end of last year.

Abbey's separate IT and customer operations will be merged into a new unit called "Abbey Manufacturing", which will have two IT directors working under the bank's customer operations director.

SCH has also set up a Milton Keynes-based subsidiary called Isban, which will be responsible for rolling out SCH's Partenon banking platform across Abbey.

Consolidation of the two bank's IT systems and updating Abbey's legacy systems is a key plank of the €500m savings planned by SCH and rollout of the Partenon platform is now scheduled for late 2006.

Abbey also laid to rest the record £1bn loss it made in 2002 by reporting profits of £273m for 2004 in its latest trading update this week.