Financial services group HSBC is moving its UK online banking operation from Sheffield to New York, claiming that UK internet connectivity is not up to hosting its global website.

HSBC is building a massive data centre in New York to host its hsbc.com website, which will serve its 25 million customers worldwide. When it evaluated where to host the site, it decided the UK was not a viable option, despite its worldwide headquarters being in London.

"We asked our network providers to advise us where would be the best place to locate the data centre. For global connectivity, New York is the only option. The bandwidth between the UK and Asia is tiny, with most of the internet traffic between these areas going via the US. Maybe in a couple of years you could locate in the UK, but not yet," said Jeff Wolfers, senior manager at HSBC Group Technology Strategy.

He estimates that building the data centre and the infrastructure to support the website will cost $300m by the time the project is completed in mid-2001. The New York site will be operational by the end of this year, when the UK internet banking operation will switch from Sheffield.

"When the US data centre goes live, we will offer a lot more flexibility through the website - a much more personalised service. When customers log in, they will be connected to all services through a single interface. It will use browser detection to determine the home language, and offer localised content, all via a single log-on," said Wolfers.

The data centre uses 400 Sparc processors from Sun Microsystems, running Oracle databases with 10 terabytes of storage, and will link to four processing centres in Buffalo in the US, Hong Kong, the UK and Brazil.

The transactional back-end systems are IBM mainframes running CICS and DB2, with MQSeries messaging and WebSphere application servers.

First published in Computing