In the fall of 1991, Signet was just recovering from the downturn in the real estate market of the late 1980s. In an effort to improve business efficiency in the handling of the vast amounts of information Signet was maintaining, especially in light of its new credit card business, Signet decided to outsource all commodity type information activities. Signet's goal was to establish a standardized, reliable, outsourced corporate-wide processing system. Given the amount of this style of work which ABC Information Systems was already doing for much larger banking institutions, Signet believed they would be the perfect match to capture the technology of an organization already far down the learning curve.