IBS Journal September 2015
Thailand-based Kbank replaces Temenos’ TCB with FIS’s Profile core banking system
Kasikornbank (Kbank), one of the largest banks in Thailand, has gone live with a new core banking system, following a three- year modernisation project. The system in- stalled is FIS’s Profile and replaces a heavily customised version of Temenos’ TCB. According to Kbank’s chairman and
CEO, Banthoon Lamsam, the new platform will increase stability and ensure preci- sion within the bank’s customer database system, enhance connectivity capabilities with customer-facing platforms and pro- vide real-time access to customers’ finan- cial statements. There will also be a quicker time-to-market for new products and ser- vices, and a much faster response to mar- ket movement and innovation, particularly as Kbank ‘is gearing up towards the full-on digital business era, in which digital bank- ing will become exponentially significant’. The new core banking system is a ‘mile-
stone achieved’ and will bring about ‘rev- olutionary changes’ in the bank’s services, Lamsam states. Kbank signed for Profile in 2012 to
replace the TemenosCorebanking (TCB) platform, which had been in place at the bank for around five years by that time. Kbank was the largest taker of TCB
(and the first TCB customer that is paying maintenance). IBM was involved in the roll- out. The system was heavily customised, although there were noises from Temenos around 2012 that Kbank was committed to move to a packaged version of TCB once it was available. At the time, Temenos claimed to be in
an advanced stage of bringing to market the packaged version of this high-end, main- frame-based retail system. ‘The issue with TCB is that it was never fully packaged,’ Temenos CEO, David Arnott, told IBS at the time. So, in order not to wait until the packaged product was ready, it was selling what it had, through the product roadmap. TCB was sold togeth- er with the source code, so that customers could maintain and develop their system themselves in the meantime. However, later that year, Kbank opted for Profile. The next phase at Kbank will focus on
digital banking. The bank is already known for its openness towards all things digital,
20 © IBS Intelligence 2015 Kbank HQ, Bangkok
with it being among the first in the country to embrace social media. The aim is to introduce a service that
enables ‘seamless transactions, regard- less of time and location, across every technological platform that matches the latest trends’, Lamsam says. This will span across retail and corporate business lines,
with customers being able to make instant transactions ‘at any time and from any place around the globe, as well as accom- modating diverse consumer lifestyles, the Asean Economic Community (AEC) advent [coming into effect by the end of this year] and cross-border trade at all levels’. Tanya Andreasyan
IN BRIEF
Malaysia Building Society Berhad (MBSB) is looking to obtain an Islamic banking licence as it plans its merger with an Islamic banking services provider, Bank Muamalat Malaysia Berhad. The building society has been looking for a new merger partner since its inten-
tion to join forces with another two entities, CIMB Group and RHB Capital, to form a Malaysian mega bank, fell through in early 2015. It is believed that MBSB considered Bank Islam and a local subsidiary of Kuwait
Finance House, but nothing came to pass. The latest attempt seems to be more fruitful, and if the merger between MBSB
and Bank Muamalat is successful, the resulting entity is going to be a prominent play- er in the Islamic banking market of Malaysia. Bank Muamalat is one of the oldest Islamic banks in the country, having been established in the late 1990s. The integration pains might be eased by the fact that both MBSB and Bank Mua-
malat are using the same core banking software, namely the SIBS system from a domestic provider, Silverlake Axis. MBSB selected SIBS in 2012 as part of its major business transformation pro-
gramme. Not long after, Bank Muamalat also settled for SIBS, following two earlier unsuccessful attempts to move to a new system (one was with Path’s iMAL and the other with Temenos’ T24). —Tanya Andreasyan
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