IBS Journal June 2015


‘What we had to fix, when we joined, was the structure of a disciplined way to manage business requests and align them wiith the longer-term IT


Harry Margaritis, Commercial Bank of Qatar


Greek bank, Eurobank, along with a num- ber of other senior IT colleagues. Previ- ously, at Commercial Bank, there wasn’t a long-term outlook, he says, so a lot of pro- jects happened on a piecemeal, case-by-


joined, was the structure of a disciplined way to manage business requests and align them with the longer-term IT strat- egy,’ he says. It is easy to become distract- ed from medium and long-term goals by tactical ones. ‘The things we are doing now


and should provide a sound platform for responding much faster to the needs of the business. Commercial Bank has an appetite for innovation, he says, and is par-


and improved time-to-market. A fair amount of the work around


Equation has been done by India-based Pennant Technologies which has a back- ground in Equation-related projects and has worked on some areas of development for Misys in the past, including Islamic banking support. The company’s found- ers were drawn from a number of banks’ IT departments from around the Middle East. Pennant was initially selected in late 2013 by Commercial Bank to work on a project to expose a number of Equation process- es as services, in the area of personal, con- sumer and vehicle loan booking. The emphasis for this project, as for


all others, was on a SOA approach and industry standards such as IFX. For ser- vice semantics, the bank has followed the standards and services of the Banking


© IBS Intelligence 2015


Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) and,


bank in the Middle East to join this SAP- derived industry body.


well, with the work being good quality and with deadlines met, says Margaritis. Pen- nant then started work to help automate


-


ing and then other areas such as approval processes. This was for ‘account-based ser- vices’, he says, such as time deposits. Equa- tion was lacking functionality in a num- ber of areas, he says. As an example, the old system ‘had no notion of an approval process for time deposits ’. For this pro- ject, Pennant used its pennApps software,


platform. This provides a control frame- -


ject started in Q2 2014 and was completed before the end of the year. The third project for Pennant is to


implement the centralised pricing rules repository, which will handle all fees and charges. At present, the bank has no way to centrally maintain and apply pricing rules, with such rules hard-coded in a num- ber of applications. The rules are not being properly applied, which results in ‘revenue leakage’. While the development is being car-


ried out with the bank, the resultant sys- tem is intended to become a standard


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but, other than this, the requirements are generic and the bank expects to be able


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