IBS Journal February 2015
Jordan Kuwait Bank: groupthink
With the country’s central bank nearing the end of a project to overhaul the banking infrastructure, now is a good time for banks in Jordan to make sure that their own houses are in order. Jordan Kuwait Bank, part of the Burgan Bank Group, has done just that.
One of the most proactive banks in the Middle East from a technology standpoint is Burgan Bank Group. The group is owned by Kipco (Kuwait Projects Company) and has banks in six countries across the region, comprising Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Syria and Kuwait, plus a subsidiary in Turkey, and has been working on stand- ardising its IT operations. The banks in the different countries retain distinct identities, however, implementing the same systems as each other, but independently. IBS interviewed Ivan Jensen, chief tech-
nology officer at the umbrella Burgan Bank Group in 2013 about the strategy, at a time when Jordan Kuwait Bank, Burgan Bank Ku- wait and Tunis International Bank were all implementing the ICS Banks core banking solution from Jordan-based ICSFS. At that time, it was expected that the three banks would go live with ICS Banks in February 2014, but in the event the different projects took longer, dragging into the middle of the year and beyond. Burgan Bank Kuwait is targeting a go-live in February 2015, while Tunis International Bank went live around November time. The bank with the largest footprint is Jordan Kuwait Bank. It has 55 branches in
Jordan plus two in Palestine and one in Cy- prus. Its initial go-live date had been even earlier than Jensen indicated, in 2013, but the cutover eventually took place in June 2014. Abdel Karem Freihat, the head of IT at Jordan Kuwait Bank, explains how the bank went about its core replacement project, what went wrong and what went right. ‘Business is actually very good.
‘So our goal for 2015 will be to modernise all delivery channels, starting from the branch then moving onto ATMs and internet banking.’
Abdel Karem Freihat, Jordan Kuwait Bank
Despite the situation in the market and the region, I think we are doing well with decent growth,’ says Freihat. The major back-end improvements the banks wanted to achieve were got out of the way in 2014, and 2015 is going to be the year the bank enhances its customer-facing side. The back office not only has a new core system with ICS Banks, but a new payments switch, Smartvista from BPC Banking Technologies. ‘So our goal for 2015 will be to modernise all delivery channels, starting from the branch then moving onto ATMs and internet banking. We will be adding mobile banking services, and establishing a completely integrated contact centre with social media integration,’ he adds. Also on the wishlist are new decision making support systems. The bank wants to implement new business intelligence software, a new management informa- tion system (MIS) and a new customer relationship management (CRM) platform. ‘This will all give us good tools to improve our selling capabilities as well as the customer experience with the bank. And the strategic objective is to actually grow our market share in retail banking, which is very important,’ he declares. The bank faced a testing couple of
years as it was implementing the payments switch and the core banking solution, mostly at the same time. But there was a strong rationale for replacing the core, Freihat states. The legacy system was 20 years old and was built internally by the
34 © IBS Intelligence 2015
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case study: jordan kuwait bank
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