IBS Journal May 2015
Commercial Bank of Qatar in major IT revamp
India-based Pennant Technologies is near- ing delivery of the first phase of a new pricing rules engine for long-standing customer, Commercial Bank of Qatar. The solution is intended to become a standard product offering, slotting into Pennant’s suite alongside existing products for areas such as customer experience, lending, bill payment, and Islamic financing and profit sharing. The development is one part of a
major IT transformation at the 30-branch Commercial Bank of Qatar (a full case study on this project will be featured in the June edition of the IBS Journal). The bank has an old version of Misys’ Equation as its core banking system and Pennant has done a number of projects around this, includ- ing implementing its pennApps software, which it describes as a unified processing platform, to improve automation for loan booking and other areas. According to Harry Margaritis, the
bank’s head of IT enterprise architecture and analytics, at present the bank has no way to centrally maintain and apply pric- ing rules. Such rules are hard-coded in a number of applications and are not being properly applied, which results in ‘revenue leakage’. The new centralised pricing rules repository will handle all fees and charges. There is an Equation-specific element to the work but, other than this, the require- ments are generic and the bank expects to
Commercial Bank Plaza, Doha
be able to benefit from standard releases in the future. The development started in the third quarter of last year and the first phase is scheduled for deployment in May. It is one more piece in the bank’s strat-
egy that has been underway for the last year or so and has an emphasis on SOA and industry standards, such as IFX. For service semantics, the bank has followed the standards and services of the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) and, indeed, in 2013 Commercial Bank became the first bank in the Middle East to join this SAP-derived industry body. An important component in the bank’s
new architecture has been an enterprise services bus (ESB), the open source JBoss Fuse from Red Hat. For CRM it has select- ed Microsoft Dynamics and, to comple- ment this, a business process management
IN BRIEF
Turkey’s Isbank is in a major software revamp at its European subsidiary. Frankfurt- based Isbank AG is implementing a new core banking system, Avaloq Banking Suite, and a new trade finance solution, DOKA 5. The latter is supplied by a specialist ven- dor, Surecomp, which has a number of trade finance systems in its portfolio. DOKA originates from Germany. It was developed by a domestic vendor, Dialog Orienterte Software (DOS), which was acquired by Surecomp in 2010. The new trade finance software will replace a largely manual set-up at Isbank.
The selection process was a protracted one, with a couple of stops and starts along the way, IBS understands. Surecomp competed with Switzerland-based Micro Infor- matique & Technologies (MIT) for the deal. It is understood that Misys’ offering, Fusionbanking Trade Innovation, was evaluated at an early stage, but did not make it to the final. Talks about Surecomp winning the Isbank deal have been circulating in the mar-
ket for quite some time now (IBS reported on this last November), but the vendor has been tight lipped until very recently. It has now officially confirmed that the project is under way, taking place in parallel to Isbank’s core banking initiative.
solution, K2 Blackpearl, from a South Afri- ca-based company, K2. A data warehouse, IBM’s Cognos-derived offering, is linked to Microsoft’s BI suite. Equation remains, at least for the time-being. Margaritis 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’. Ripping and replacing Equation would have frozen many of the current pro- jects, so it was decided that it was better to do the transformation around the old core at present. Pennant was set up by senior manag-
ers from a number of banks in the Middle East in 2005, initially doing bespoke devel- opments. One customer was Misys, with Pennant carrying out some development work on Equation, particularly for Islamic banking, in 2008 and 2009. Pennant now has over 100 staff, with a steep increase in the last year, and has broadened from its Equation roots, so has carried out projects around other mainstream core banking systems such as Temenos’ 24, Oracle FSS’s Flexcube and Infosys’ Finacle. Pennant’s product set has evolved,
centred on its J2EE-based pennApps, and customers include Ajman Bank, Al Ahli Bank, Al Baraka Bank, Emirates NBD, National Bank of Fujairah, National Bank of Kuwait, National Bank of Oman, RAK Bank, and Sharjah Islamic Bank. For lend- ing, it competes with the likes of Nucleus Software, with its FinnOne system, as well as with mainstream regional core vendors such as ITS and Path Solutions. While all customers are currently in the Middle East, the supplier is eyeing Africa, opened a sales office in the UK last year, and also feels there is potential in India.
10 © IBS Intelligence 2015
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