Banco
Banco is a new core banking system, introduced to the market in 2010. ‘Banco is a brand new development, with a new platform, new technology framework and new business process vision,’ stated Torabi. ‘It has been designed for international markets, so it is multi- cultural, multi-lingual, multi-currency and multi-calendar.’ The vendor spent a year on research and another two years on developing Banco. It is web-based, centralised and modular, has n-tier architecture and is Service Oriented Architecture-compliant, according to the supplier. One of the main features of Banco is standardisation in protocols, development and production. Tick- IT standards are used in production, IFX (Interactive Financial Exchange), Swift and ISO 8583 are used in communication with other banking and payment systems.
Banco is platform independent. It can use JDBC, ORM, Oracle and DB2 for data access and the management layer. The system has a Java platform for its business layer, with a Microsoft .Net framework for the presentation layer. ‘According to our research, the .Net framework is a better technology for the Farsi and Arabic languages.’ Torabi also noted that other technologies aren’t as mature as WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation, a graphical subsystem for rendering user interfaces in Windows-based applications). ‘By using WPF we can offer our customers both web and desktop presentation layers.’ In addition, .Net technology is popular in Iran which translates into a wide resource pool and lower production costs. At launch, the system covered retail and corporate banking, private banking, treasury, trade finance, payments and Islamic banking. Further functionality was added in the course of 2010. The first two takers were Sarmaye Bank (Iran’s second largest privately-owned bank) and Mehr Gharz Al-Hassaneh Bank, both users of Tosan’s older core system, Negin (Negin continues to be supported, developed and marketed, but only domestically). City Bank, a mid-tier universal bank with 120+ branches in Iran, became the first new-name win. For City Bank, the new system is hosted in Tosan’s data centre and supports the core, trade finance,
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cards, internet and mobile banking operations. In 2011, the vendor added three further Banco users: Fars Bank, Pishgaman Finance and Credit Institution, and Iran and Venezuela Bank. The latter is the first international site for Banco: the system is to be implemented in Venezuela (as well as Iran). The following year brought another win for Banco in Iran, at the Co- operative Financial Institution of Tehran Municipality. And in 2013 IDCorp scored a win in Somalia at Amal, a money
transfer operator. This was the first taker in Africa. Modules taken included core, payments, treasury and FX, card management and virtual banking. This deal was hoped to be a springboard into Africa. According to the vendor, Banco is intended to be suitable both for
Shia (countries such as Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan and Bahrain) and Sunni (the majority of the Middle Eastern states, as well as South and South- East Asia and Africa) markets. ‘There isn’t such a huge gap between them, so generally Banco is suitable for both,’ said Torabi. ‘Also, we consider all possible kinds of Islamic contracts in the parameters of our system, so clients can define their own new products.’ He said that Tosan consulted the research institute of Bank Negara Malaysia (central bank of Malaysia) during the development of Banco and received input on the regional specifics of contract structuring and interpretation of products. As a result, Banco is capable of supporting the full range of Islamic contracts in Malaysia and Indonesia, said Torabi. Similar collaborations with other Islamic centres in the region were under way by late 2011. In 2012, the vendor signed a Shari’ah compliance contract with Malaysia-based International Shari’ah Research Academy for Islamic Finance (ISRA), to review and approve the Islamic contracts of Banco. By early 2013, work was under way for murabaha and al bai bithaman ajil (BBA). Banco is an integrated, centralised, online and real-time system for Islamic banking, with a broad range of product support. It also ‘costs much less’ than the offerings of international vendors yet delivers ‘the same capabilities’, claimed Torabi.
Islamic Report
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