IBS Journal Supplement 2015


Masterstrokes and mistakes


What are the masterstrokes and mistakes when it comes to implementing banking systems? We felt that the best way to answer this question was to talk to some of those who had been there at the ‘coal face’. After all, a lot of the time the lessons are not passed on, so that projects run into the same issues, again and again. Indeed, the delivery track-record in the sector has shown no discernible improvement over the years.


We asked a selection of practitioners, from the user and consulting sides of the business, to pick their top priorities for a successful project and the three most common mistakes, plus the area that is most consistently underestimated.


Human factors


The quality and structure of the team are common themes. For instance, Leo Toderici, deputy CEO/COO at Banca Transilvania in Romania, says, ‘team structure, team dynamics and teamwork are extremely important’. The bank had a successful implementation of Oracle FSS’s Flexcube, going live in late 2012 with a rare core banking system replacement in Central Europe. ‘The team members had complementary skills, deep domain exper- tise, and experience of similar projects in the past. Our team structure was lean


and efficient and we cut out redundancy wherever possible.’ Another to have gone through an


ultimately successful Central European core banking systems roll-out, this time of Temenos’ T24, is Ernst Fanzott, director at Belgrade-based ZIS d.o.o. ZIS was the IT shared services centre of Austrian bank, Hypo Alpe Adria Bank, and has subse- quently been acquired by HP. Although there were considerable problems with the first site, Montenegro, things went much smoother in subsequent sites. Fanzott’s advice is, ‘select a strong


team which is dedicated 100 per cent to the project and is made up of the best people with the required knowledge’. Those in the project team should be familiar with the industry and will have worked on core banking system imple- mentations elsewhere. ‘It is too important, too complex and cost intensive to allow


experiments. The project manager should be somebody who understands the content.’ That person shouldn’t be purely a ‘methodology and process’ person, he says, and they need to be surrounded by a good project management office that manages the workload and helps with the organisation, task tracking, documenta- tion and other tasks. Nothing beats experience. This is


emphasised by Johan de Meyer, currently core banking programme manager at Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and a veteran of several core banking system projects. ‘Get people with real-life core banking experience into the bank very early on in the programme. I do not believe, with few exceptions, that you can lead a major core banking programme if you have not been in other core banking programmes before. You don’t know what’s waiting for you.’ The bank also needs to be willing to ‘sacrifice’


‘Make absolutely sure that the business case of not doing


anything is worse than doing the core banking programme.’ Johan de Meyer, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank


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© IBS Intelligence 2015


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analysis: running a core banking project


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