Ethiopia-based Construction & Business Bank (CBB) has officially inaugurated Temenos’ T24 core banking system, 11 years after announcing the first bid.
The state-owned bank’s project – known as the Banking Software Selection Implementation (BSSI) – had its first bid back in October 2004 and was plagued by problems.
The first attempt attracted ten bidders, including Temenos, but the nine others failed the technical evaluation and so CBB cancelled it.
In November 2006 the second bid was also cancelled, as the Public Financial Institutions Supervision Agency required the bank to hire a consultant to oversee the process and performance.
Due to this demand, CBB scrapped the bid and went for third time lucky in August 2009.
It hired another state entity, the Information Network Security Agency, to do the consultancy work and develop the infrastructure.
The last tender saw six bidders competing, leading to a shortlist of three companies, with Temenos finally winning the contract.
The project had four parts: IT infrastructure deployment, core banking implementation, data migration and cleansing, and the card system implementation.
The bank says T24 interfaces with the national payment system at the central bank, known as the Ethiopian Automated Transfer Switch (last year BPC Banking Technologies won the contract to develop this new platform). This will allow CBB customers to trade on the Ethiopian Commodities Exchange.
With the implementation ‘officially’ completed, CBB reveals that it took five years of processing and six years for implementation of the project.
It says a ‘lack of skilled manpower, work overload, problems with the core banking solution in the implementation phase were to blame for the long process’. The bank even suffered a lack of electric power, which it fixed by purchasing generators for its branches.
Events in Ethiopia
Within Ethiopia there have been a number of other takers of T24 in the last few years.
Nib International Bank (NIB) opted for T24 and Temenos won over Oracle FSS, Sopra Banking Software (formerly Delta Informatique), Misys, Neptune Software and Infrasoft Technologies for the contract.
Other core banking clients include Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, Bank of Abyssinia and Development Bank of Ethiopia.
However, Temenos has competition in the country.
Recently, Enat Bank said it was in the final stages of piloting Oracle FSS’s Flexcube core banking system.
The system was bought for ETB 15 million ($719,000) after a troubled and lengthy bidding period.
This followed an earlier tender in 2012, which ended with the selection of Infrasoft Technologies and its OmniEnterprise offering. However, this deal subsequently fell through.
Another protracted selection was at Debub Global Bank, which after a number of stops and starts finally settled for Flexcube. The implementation, however, was much faster: it was completed in a four-month timeframe. The work was carried out by the vendor’s consulting services arm and BFSI Software Consulting, Oracle’s India-based integration partner.
Debub Global Bank got its banking licence in 2012, and was known to be in the market since then looking for a core banking platform.