BTA Bank (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan) Development Bank of Tajikistan (Tajikistan) Gazprombank (Russia) Nomos-Bank (Russia) Nordea (Russia) MTS Bank (Russia) Sberbank (Russia) Transcreditbank (Russia) Universalbank (Moldova) Vozrozhdenie (Russia) VTB Bank (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan) Ziraat Bank (Russia)
Selection
MTS Bank adopted an aggressive development strategy but the existing legacy system could not support it, said Sergey Shuvalov, who joined in 2010 in the role of vice president and head of IT. The system could not meet 'contemporary business requirements', and the installation architecture was also deemed unsuitable.
The bank needed to create 'a consolidated, modern IT platform', which resulted in the bank going to market in search of a suitable offering. The selection process was difficult, recalled Shuvalov. Initially, the bank cast its net wide and looked at international providers alongside domestic ones. However, 'our own experience and the experience of other large domestic banks has demonstrated that foreign core systems simply cannot keep up with the regulatory changes in Russia, and they cannot always meet our business requirements either'. The reality is such that the release of the relevant patches cannot catch up with the frequency of the changes made by the regulators, he observed. Plus, there is a language barrier to consider, and differences in culture and mentality. All this adds up to a large amount of project and operational risks.
International systems do have an advantage over their Russian counterparts, in terms of scalability and functionality, said Shuvalov. But they cannot be applied to the Russian market as 'off the shelf' solutions, he believes. Russian accounting and reporting standards still differ greatly from the international ones. The process of customisation and adaptation is complex, costly, and time
