A popular choice
For the core banking system, the team was clear that it wanted a universal banking system with a modern service-oriented architecture and API connectivity. After evaluating a few vendors, the bank decided to select Oracle’s Flexcube core banking system mainly due to its stability and strong presence in the Zambian market.
Out of the 17 banks in Zambia, at least 11 banks were reportedly using Flexcube, which made it a popular choice for core banking systems in the market. The hardware, including the data centre, was also provided by Oracle. As an implementation partner, the bank chose Techurate, given its strong track record of implementations in Zambia and the presence of a local team in the country. The other factors that went in Techurate’s favour were that in addition to being a Flexcube core banking implementation specialist, the firm also offered a suite of digital channels solutions.
The ZICB team had significant pressure from the Central Bank to open the bank at the earliest opportunity in order to service the customers of the previous bank who were carried over into ZICB. The bank’s IT team involved Techurate right from the beginning in January 2018 when it started designing a detailed blueprint of the system requirements and architecture.
While Techurate was formally employed only in April 2018, this meticulous process of designing a detailed blueprint allowed the bank and Techurate to complete the implementation of the core banking system and make basic banking services available to the existing customers within just six weeks in May 2018. One of the other aspects that contributed to this rapid deployment was the out of the box implementation with minimal customisation and no major data migration activity. For the existing customers of the previous bank, only the end of day balances was carried forward into the new core banking system. Additionally, to minimise the cost, the low-value bank customers from the previous bank were migrated to an e-wallet platform, developed by Techurate, which could meet all the customers’ service requests while avoiding the costs associated with onboarding these customers to the core banking system.