Case Study
Coventry Building Society was established in 1884 and is now the second largest building society in the UK. With 70 branches and assets of over £49 billion, the Society now provides a variety of products to over 2 million members. Over 55 ATMs provide a wide range of services to LINK and Visa cardholders including cash withdrawal and PIN services. In addition a mini statement service is available to Coventry Building Society cardholders. The Society’s Visa Plus card can be used to withdraw cash from ATMs in the UK and abroad.In 2003 SPL fully managed the installation of OpeN/2®, an ACI Worldwide product, which drives the ATM authorisation and switching system at the Society.
Since then, SPL has worked with the Society to develop and implement numerous enhancements to their systems. These include remote key load, allowing the dynamic change of ATM keys, the introduction of chip card processing, Active-Active EAS which gives automatic fail-over resilience to the direct connection to Visa and Active-Active to provide resilience to the OpeN/2® system, with two systems running side by side. The SPL product IDS enables software changes to be implemented without any system downtime. SPL also works with ACI Worldwide to implement upgrades to the OpeN/2® system.
Most recently, SPL has been heavily involved in the following projects:
Introduction of a PCI environment
This project included extensive involvement from SPL from project requirements and specifications right through to installation of a Cardholder Data Environment and migration of all OpeN/2® and SPL products.
The implementation of key blocks for storing symmetric encryption keys
In conjunction with ACI Worldwide, SPL fully managed the migration of all symmetric encryption keys used by OpeN/2® to Thales HSM keyblock format in order to comply with new PCI security requirements.
TR-34/TR-31 encryption standards
Encryption standards for TR-31 Secure Key Exchange and TR-34 Distribution of Symmetric Keys using Asymmetric Techniques were successfully implemented in August 2022.
TR-31 key blocks are used to transport symmetric encryption keys to ATMs. TR-34, which uses SHA-256 certificates and signatures, incorporates a process to 'bind' an ATM Encrypting PIN Pad with the CBS OpeN/2 server.
SPL developed the technical specification and was responsible for the project management of this important project.
SPL worked with ACI Worldwide, from the design phase through to implementation, to deliver the system changes required to support TR-34/TR-31.
All LINK and Visa mandated changes are supported by SPL as well as ATM download changes and disaster recovery planning and practice.
SPL also independently develops and installs its own products at the Society. These products include
SPL provides ongoing support and consultancy for all SPL products as well as first line support and consultancy for OpeN/2®.