National Commercial Bank (NCB) has signed an agreement with IBM and its Saudi business partner, Saudi Business Machines (SBM), to outsource the development and hosting of its website components for its new corporate portal.

The NCB website, which was jointly developed in conjunction with IBM and SBM, has been hosted at the recently launched IBM/DIC eHosting centre at DIC.

The announcement marks the first outsourcing deal of this nature in the Middle East banking industry, where services are hosted in the Middle East, rather than at hosting centres in the U.S. or Europe.

Outsourcing is developing into a major strategy for Middle East organisations as it allows businesses to focus on their core business and customer services.

The new e-banking portal will become a primary source of information for customers, with online customer service information, newsletters, stock values, financial news, and currency calculators and online fund and stock prices.

For its consumer banking customers, NCB's portal will offer access to quality information and unique investment opportunities.

"The ability to communicate with our customers securely and reliably via the Internet is what is driving NCB's continuing success. Strong customer relations are at the heart of the banking business: this portal will provide easy and reliable access to information and services to our customers," said Omar Hashem, e-business development manager, NCB.

"We are proud to be working on this pioneering project with one of the leading retail banks in the Middle East. IBM's eHosting centre at DIC offers some of the world's most sophisticated technology facilities to help NCB transform to e-banking more quickly and easily," said Hasan Barraj, general manager of SBM.

"We will be working closely with NCB to ensure that performance and availability levels are maintained to the highest standards so that their customers to fully benefit from their e-banking services anytime, anywhere."