Yoniii
July 7th, 2010, 01:17 PM
The long overdue IT procurement by the largest and oldest bank in the country, the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE), was signed and sealed two weeks ago by an international technology vendor based in Switzerland, Temenos Group AG.
Acquiring a technology known in the finance industry as core banking solutions has been an elusive target for the CBE for the last 15 years. Its rather younger competitors, such as Dashen and United Bank, have been utilising the system for a few years now. Others, such as Wegagen, Zemen, and Abyssinia, are well on their way.
The CBE is the latest in the march for the use of the latest banking software, procured at a cost of nearly 70 million Br.
“Our system will be a lot different from what [other] banks in the market are using,” said Bekalu Zeleke, the youngest chief of the 68-year old state bank. “Ours is comprehensive and state-of-the-art.”
The automation will be implemented in all the 219 branches of the bank in a year’s time, according to Bekalu.
Although the CBE has been slowly losing its market share to the 12 newly emerged private banks, its size (54.8 billion Br in deposit) and earnings in 2010 (3.5 billion Br) helps it remain as the dominant bank in the market. Even its competitors acknowledge that it recently pulled the rug out from under their feet by upgrading the quality of its services across its branches, following its business process reengineering (BPR).
“I think that we need not travel overseas to look for a bank to benchmark our reforms,” said a chief of a known private bank. “The manner in which the CBE has improved its services could influence us to use it as a benchmark.”
The CBE’s acquiring of a core banking system is yet another step in its quest for improvement. The vendor it selected, Temenos, is solely engaged in providing core banking systems. Its system is used by over 500 clients in over 100 countries. The Geneva based company has 34 offices in 29 countries. It is represented in Ethiopia by its local partner, United Systems Integrators (USI).
Temenos had to beat other major contenders to bag the CBE’s multimillion dollar contract. The Indian based Infosys was one of the 10 vendors sought for a bid and was shortlisted together with Temenos for the final evaluation. Three local companies, Transnational Computer Technology (TCT), Oratech, and Global Computing Solutions (GCS), competed in partnership with FLEXCUBE, an IT company recently acquired by Oracle, which installed the core banking systems for Dashen and United banks.
:cheers:
Acquiring a technology known in the finance industry as core banking solutions has been an elusive target for the CBE for the last 15 years. Its rather younger competitors, such as Dashen and United Bank, have been utilising the system for a few years now. Others, such as Wegagen, Zemen, and Abyssinia, are well on their way.
The CBE is the latest in the march for the use of the latest banking software, procured at a cost of nearly 70 million Br.
“Our system will be a lot different from what [other] banks in the market are using,” said Bekalu Zeleke, the youngest chief of the 68-year old state bank. “Ours is comprehensive and state-of-the-art.”
The automation will be implemented in all the 219 branches of the bank in a year’s time, according to Bekalu.
Although the CBE has been slowly losing its market share to the 12 newly emerged private banks, its size (54.8 billion Br in deposit) and earnings in 2010 (3.5 billion Br) helps it remain as the dominant bank in the market. Even its competitors acknowledge that it recently pulled the rug out from under their feet by upgrading the quality of its services across its branches, following its business process reengineering (BPR).
“I think that we need not travel overseas to look for a bank to benchmark our reforms,” said a chief of a known private bank. “The manner in which the CBE has improved its services could influence us to use it as a benchmark.”
The CBE’s acquiring of a core banking system is yet another step in its quest for improvement. The vendor it selected, Temenos, is solely engaged in providing core banking systems. Its system is used by over 500 clients in over 100 countries. The Geneva based company has 34 offices in 29 countries. It is represented in Ethiopia by its local partner, United Systems Integrators (USI).
Temenos had to beat other major contenders to bag the CBE’s multimillion dollar contract. The Indian based Infosys was one of the 10 vendors sought for a bid and was shortlisted together with Temenos for the final evaluation. Three local companies, Transnational Computer Technology (TCT), Oratech, and Global Computing Solutions (GCS), competed in partnership with FLEXCUBE, an IT company recently acquired by Oracle, which installed the core banking systems for Dashen and United banks.
:cheers: