Bank Profile
Bank Sohar is a start up bank in Oman. Bank Sohars entry into the Oman banking sphere came about amidst much hype and fanfare. Bank Sohars IPO was oversubscribed more than 5 times even before the bank opened, revealing the Omanis expectations. With a strong group of promoters behind it, Bank Sohar now has an initial built up capital of 50 million Omani Rial (approx 125 million USD). Bank Sohar will cover the entire range of retail, corporate and investment banking services. Bank Sohar will focus on specific market segments and a phased approach to launching new products and services gradually evolving into a universal bank.
Key Business Drivers
Technology is viewed from 3 perspectives:
The demands that arise from the complexity of the operating environment created by urgent imperatives, risk mitigation drivers, sales roll-outs and so on cannot be ignored. Typically, deployment of solutions in such an environment translates into a period of about 18-24 months. The project can exceed this period, as well, if the architecture is complex and mired by inflexible legacy systems.
The imperat i ves, when the environment requires pure vanilla offerings and quick deployment schedules, are unique. For banks who want to synchronize technology and processes, BIAB offers solutions with which organizations can start leveraging technology benefits from day one.
The focus of the bank, that centres around absorbing best-in-class processes and banking practices, needs to be addressed effectively. Technology can help them compete aggressively with players in the international arena.
Solution Overview
Technology Players: Matching the Pace of Banking
Finacle Bank-in-a-Box (BIAB) framework is a new implementation paradigm that allows a bank to go live on Finacle core banking solution in a very short span. It is a pre-configured, fully integrated banking transformation solution based on its proven universal banking solution.
BIAB is an approach aimed at bringing down the implementation time and most importantly provides customers a best configured banking environment.
The bank wanted to implement the Finacle universal banking solution covering the functionalities of core banking, treasury, e-banking and CRM with interfaces to ATM, SWIFT, Oracle GL and RTGS/ACH apart from other third party products such as NetCast and Omnidocs.
Finacle had allocated four months to complete the project, however because Bank Sohar was a start up, it was engaged in its recruitment process which impacted the start date. The challenges included executing a project with key decision making personnel not on board from the beginning and basic infrastructure not in place at the bank’s site. The implementation was delayed by two months until February 2007, however, the deadline date had not changed as the banks CEO strongly requested that the original date of 1st April 2007, be maintained.
This posed significant risks, resulting from completing a four month project in less than two months, which meant that every activity would have to be watertight, without any contingency whatsoever. Thus, there was no scope for lags in any activity.
It was decided that Finacle Bank-in-a-Box would be deployed to save time and effort. Since this was a new bank, it was deemed that this would also add value in terms of providing a readily available base of best banking practices. The plan was to adopt a recommend approach rather than a requirement seeking approach.
Detailed project planning was done to carefully chart out every activity and crunch the activity to the bare minimum.
Core team training and Business Process Definition (BPD) traditionally done sequentially were now designed to be performed in parallel.
The BPD document which consisted of multiple modules and was traditionally signed off at the very end was now broken into multiple documents to facilitate quick sign offs after each module was completed.
To perform a complete but timely testing during System Integration Testing and User Acceptance Testing, Infosys recommended that the bank engage its Finacle Testing services unit to carry out this activity, which they did, ensuring timely completion.
Senior management commi tment Unequivocal commitment from the top management throughout the different phases of the implementation, paid off. It was defined in the project kick off meeting that all issues (on the banks side) should be escalated to the senior management immediately, which worked to ensure a disciplined and smooth implementation.
Core team training / BPD An 18-day workshop was designed with daily activities listed. Business owners responsible for sign offs for each of the days were also listed. Core training was planned to be performed during the first half of the day and the BPD immediately afterwards.
Benefits of Leveraging Technology
Bank Sohar core banking implementation (Phase1) was carried out before the bank formally opened its doors to the public within a record breaking timeframe of 56 days.
Was executed under a non-negotiable deadline committed to the bank
The retail loan module was not part of the initial project scope. However, 2 weeks from Go Live, the bank requested that at least one retail loan product be delivered as this was a basic requirement for local customers. Infosys took cognizance of the banks critical need and decided to meet it through innovative use of the corporate loan module, since a typical retail loan launch would have taken much longer. Infosys built in all the basic features of the retail loan product in the corporate loan module, positively impacting revenues from the loans portfolio for the bank.
A breakthrough decision taken, resulted in the actual revenue of the loans portfolio growing to over 10 times the expected target.