Equity Bank in Kenya started its operations in 1984 as Equity Building Society (EBS). Its initial focus was therefore on mortgage services. In the early 1990s it experienced financial difficulties and in 1992 almost faced liquidation by the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK). EBS's remit of creating affordable and accessible financial services for ordinary Kenyans meant CBK could grant EBS a stay of execution and the firm was allowed to re-invent itself. In 1994 it changed its business focus to microfinance services. From day one, Equity had coped with the difficulties of manual systems until June 2000 when it launched a computerised management information system. This change contributed to an increase in productivity and an expansion of its portfolio. Rapid growth in business volume and outreach finally necessitated its conversion to commercial bank status. It was duly registered on 31st December 2004 as Equity Bank Limited.
By mid-2005, Equity Bank's legacy system, theWindows-based Bankers Realm from local supplier, Craft Silicon, was falling short of expectations. In fact, it was proving incapable of managing the increased transactional requirements of a customer base that had reached around 500,000 depositors and 12,000 borrowers, by mid-2005, according to AllanWaititu, head of operations at Equity Bank.
There were problems with Bankers Realm's capacity to support large volumes of inter-branch transactions.Waititu said the bank's Citrix-based client-server architecture needed significant investment to optimise use of theWide Area Network (WAN), but even then the architecture created 'massive inter-branch reconciliation problems'. These problems were exacerbated by the poor general network infrastructure available from local providers (mainly VSAT by Gilat Alldean, and Telkom Kenya dial-up and leased lines).Microwave and fibre- optic technology by Kenya Data Networks was just being introduced and had not yet taken root for extensive branch coverage. In addition, the software was not sufficiently scalable, 'given the inherent limitations ofMicrosoft SQL database', to support the full centralisation of data and transactions on the same database/system.
A further problem arose when it was realised that Bankers Realm had not been tested and stabilised for ATMsupport, even though the bank desperately needed
