system, Temenos was willing to fix it,' said Abu-Farha. SHB successfully went live on R8 of T24 in 2010. In this later project, testing had accounted for 75 per cent of the time and 40 per cent of the budget.
Payment technologymodernisation
By early 2010, SHB's payment technology was also undergoing significant modernisation, with S1 supplying ATMswitch functionality and a debit card management system, and First Data implementing its credit card processing software, Visionplus. The credit card project was in its initial stages at the start of 2010 and would take about a year to complete. The S1 undertaking was in a more advanced phase by then: the first stage of deploying the back office components was already done, and the second stage of transaction acquiring functionality was to be comlpeted inMay 2010.
The S1 payments platform was taken to consolidate transactions and replace disparate legacy software at SHB. It complies with Saudi Payments Network 2 (Span2) processing regulations, and covers ATMs, card management, merchant acquiring services, dispute management, back office reporting and settlement. S1 was deemed a good fit for SHB: not being a huge bank it did not need a huge switch, so S1's proposition was 'quite attractive', according to the bank's spokesperson. Also, the vendor's roadmap of future payments technology development was seen by SHB as 'promising'.
Also in 2010, SHB was migrating to EMV cards and planned to introduce card issuing facilities across its branch network. This was being done with the help of Cardwizard instant issuance and PIN selection software from Dynamic Card Solutions (DCS), which was being integrated with the S1 platform.
