IBS Journal June 2015


Old core, new rules


Commercial Bank of Qatar has been doing a lot of work around its old core banking system, implementing a number of new components and seeking to move to a SOA and standards-based architecture. What has been achieved to date and what is to follow?


Commercial Bank of Qatar is mid-way through a major transformation project. Around its core banking system, Misys’ Equation, it has been putting in place a new architecture based on SOA and indus- try standards. Among the new compo- nents are an open source enterprise ser- vices bus (ESB), CRM, enterprise data ware- house, business intelligence (BI), channel solutions and a pricing rules engine. ‘We are standardising the technology and approach in all of these areas,’ says Harry Margaritis, the bank’s head of IT enterprise architecture and analytics. While the long- term future of the core banking system itself has yet to be decided, a lot has been achieved around it. The bank is on an old version, 3.9, of


Misys’ IBM iSeries-based workhorse, which was once a common solution in the region. Misys’ way forward is the Fusionbanking


Doha, home of Commercial Bank of Qatar ©Joi Ito, Flickr


Equation version (Bankfusion Equation, as it was previously branded), which has a Java wrapper around the old core. ‘Many of the things we are doing now would be available in the Bankfusion version, such as the way we expose services and orches- trate our loan approval processes,’ says Margaritis. He expects the bank to upgrade to the next major release, 4.0, in the next two years, ‘but it is still an open item for us for the longer term roadmap’. The problem was that, whether replac-


ing or upgrading the core banking system, a lot of other projects would have been frozen. Many of the projects that the bank has been working on would have been postponed so it was decided it was better to build around the core for the time- being, rather than ripping and replacing. Margaritis and his team have been in place for a couple of years. He moved from


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© IBS Intelligence 2015


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case study: commercial bank of qatar


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