Pibas is a Pakistan-based core banking software vendor that offers products and services for conventional and Islamic financial institutions. Its history dates to the mid-1990s, when its parent, UAE-based Pioneers Computer Company, set up Pibas in Karachi to develop core banking software. Pioneers Computer Company was formed a decade earlier in 1985, also with the sole objective to develop an international banking system.
Origins and development
The initial development of the integrated application, also called Pibas (which is an abbreviation for Pioneers International Banking Application System), was done in Sharjah, the home of Pioneers Computer Company. Subsequent development and newer versions of the system (including the latest one, Pibas Plus) have been done in Pakistan. The first release of Pibas was developed on IBM S/34 and IBM S/36 Minicomputers using IBM’s Cobol language at the back- end. This was in 1985-88. In 1990, the application was migrated on the Microcomputer platform, using RM/Cobol, making it available under MS/DOS, Novell Network and Windows as well as under Unix operating systems. With the introduction of GUI-based applications, Pibas decided to go for Visual Basic 6 with an open RDBMS interface, opening the system from the database point of view. In 2010/11, the company embarked on a system transformation project, moving the Pibas offering fully onto Microsoft’s .Net platform. The new platform would allow thin clients that would make Pibas more cost- effective, according to the vendor. The conversion was scheduled for completion by December 2012. The first taker of Pibas was Banque De Djibouti en De Moyen in the Republic of Djibouti, in 1988. The bank implemented the IBM S/34 version. In early 1992, three banks in Pakistan took the Microcomputer-based version of Pibas, followed by three banks in Kenya. Within three years, the vendor grew its customer base to 22 banks in seven countries.
