Construction & Business Bank (CBB) officially inaugurated its CORE banking system at a ceremony held on November 14, 2015 at Capital Hotel.
Its CORE banking solution, known as T24, is provided by Temenos, a Swiss banking software maker. Temenos was selected on the third bid the bank announced, after cancelling the first two.
The state-owned bank went about the process in a project it dubbed Banking Software Selection Implementation (BSSI). It announced the first bid on October 29, 2004. Ten bidders responded, including Temenos, and nine of them failed to make it through the technical evaluation, leading to the cancellation of the first. The second bid was announced much later, on November 8, 2006. That too was cancelled because the Public Financial Institutions Supervision Agency required that the bank hire a consultant to supervise the process and performance. CBB hired another state entity, the Information Network Security Agency (INSA) to undertake the consultancy as well as develop infrastructure.
CBB then launched the BSSI project on August 3, 2009. The project has four parts: IT infrastructure deployment, CORE banking implementation, data migration & cleansing, and card banking system implementation. The first phase of this project saw the 123 branches of this bank being networked with the head office located on Ras Abebe Aregay St in Sengatera area in Addis Abeba.
The last tender attracted six bidders, leading to a short list of three companies, with Temenos winning the contract.
The CORE Banking Solution includes retail banking, credit, trade finance; it will also interface with the national payment system at the central bank, called Ethiopian Automated Transfer Switch (ET-SWITCH), according to Kidus Lelisa, the project manager. This means that customers of CBB trading on the Ethiopian Commodities Exchange (ECX) can make payments by transfer through the system.
A technology and risk management consultant Fortune talked to, warns that CORE banking solutions adopted by all banks could be vulnerable to unauthorised access from anywhere. Banks should invest on infrastructure and security, he said, as well as conduct periodic vulnerability tests for their networks and systems. At CBB, providing network security is entrusted to INSA, which has done all the follow ups and implementation in developing secured infrastructure for CBB according to Haileyesus Bekele, the Bank’s president.
It took CBB five years of processing and six years for implementation of the project. Lack of skilled manpower, work overload, problems with with the CORE banking solution system in the implementation phase were to blame for the long process, according to Kidus. The Bank was also plagued by lack of electric power, which it resolved by buying generators for its branches,
Established in 1975 as the Housing & Saving Bank, it mainly focused on lending for construction and farming expansion. It was re-established in 1994, with the mandate of import financing, export financing, non resident accounts, loans, mortgages, saving deposits, investment and money transfer services.
Currently the Bank has 1,993 employees with total assets of 7.6 billion Birr, according to its unaudited report, presented in a special edition magazine published this year. The last unofficially audited report in 2014/15 shows that the Bank’s paid-up capital is 500 million Birr.
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