'maybe Temenos had a lot of projects in the Gulf area'. As he said though, the freelancers filled the gap well.
Overall, Aloufi was satisfied with the end result of the project. Alinma did not exceed the budget it had set itself, he said. 'It was a successful project, and the relationship with Temenos will not end with the implementation.We now have one centralised, integrated system.We may have had minor issues with the software but Temenos has now solved this. So it was value for time, money and effort.'
Continued co-operation between Alinma Bank and Temenos saw the roll-out of the system to the bank's branches, which were 15 in number at the time of the project but at the start of 2011 stood at 35. Functionality for underpinning new products was introduced Aloufi having stated that 'we will continue to have more products'. Other areas of focus on the IT side were around CRMand extra enhancements to the ARC front-end. The bank also decided to move all the reporting from T24 into a data warehouse. This, Aloufi believed, would 'improve the data performance'.
Though a long project, Alinma Bank appears to be well-provisioned on the technology side, which should stand it in good stead for the future. However, Temenos also seems likely to have benefited from the work put in to adapt T24 for a fully-fledged Islamic bank – a parallel can be seen with the T24 implementation undertaken by the North Shore Credit Union which led to the availability of a T24Model Bank for Canada (see the North Shore Credit Union case study).
