for example, TCS sent a team of fewer than five people, compared to another supplier which had sent around 15. ‘From all this we picked up pointers not just around technical capabilities and expertise, but also the culture of the organisation,’ said Chin. Ambank’s perceptions of the vendors were then tested against site visits to other users, and in TCS’s case, reinforced.
Vendor Finalization
In terms of functionality and features, Bancs was in the top two, before and after the proof of concept stage. Similarly for Islamic banking functionality, Bancs ‘didn’t come out best but was probably in the top two’, said Chin. He added that future capabilities as well as functionality out of the box was evaluated. But what swung the deal the way of TCS was the cultural fit. ‘When we looked at culture we had a clear winner,’ Chin stated, adding ‘in hindsight, this was the right thing to do’.
Implementation Planning the Implementation
The scope of the overall transformation project involved a big bang implementation across around 200 branches of three systems. These were TCS Bancs for core banking, the supplier’s new teller front-end and an enterprise data warehouse from Greenplum (now part of Gopivotal). Around four million customers and five million accounts were involved, with a total of around ten million records made up of customer information file plus loans, deposits and payments. About 90 interfaces were written. The enterprise data warehouse needed to be connected to many downstream systems in finance, compliance and risk, for multi-year data analysis and regulatory reporting. The teller front-end is Java-based (unlike Ambank’s version of Bancs, which is still written in Cobol at the back end) and Ambank was the first bank globally to roll this out, Chin believes. Ambank was also the first bank globally to use the multi- entity functionality of Bancs, as a way of segregating its Islamic business. ‘We created two entities within the system, Ambank and Ambank Islamic,’ he recalls. Chin believes that Ambank will be prepared for any future moves by the central bank to enforce greater separation between Islamic and conventional banking. ‘At some point they may say we have to totally segregate the books. We thought to already do that and went with two entities straight away.’ This was not possible in the old system, where there was only one entity and product and branch codes were the only way to differentiate. The big bang approach was decided on by the board largely due to the technical difficulties
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Ambank would have faced with pilot branches. State Bank of India a few years earlier rolled out Bancs on a branch- by-branch basis, but this was possible only because this bank had branch servers, Chin stated. At Ambank, where data was already centralised, ‘we would end up running multiple systems concurrently, trying to manage people and change management, and doing the reconciliation between the two systems,’ he felt. However, ‘each method has its own complications and implications’. A staggered roll-out was considered, but ‘most of the pointers favoured a big bang approach’. To counter the perception that a big bang was the more risky option, Ambank packed a long schedule of testing into the implementation plan. The bank settled on a two-year timeframe for the whole project. The weekend of 16th November 2013 was picked as the go- live weekend, and the bank never deviated from this. ‘We drew a line in the sand and said that whatever we do, we will stick to those dates,’ Chin stated. This was an ‘aggressive’ target and had ‘many detractors’, and also required people to work round the clock, to participate in midnight runs and weekend runs, ‘for a long duration’. As well as sticking to the timeframe though, the project budget came within Ambank’s estimates as well.
The implementation
The first stage of the project after selecting TCS was requirements gathering, or ‘product solution analysis’ which led to workshops and debates before Ambank could lay down
its requirements. Once this was completed, the development phase started, with testing beginning shortly after. Ambank was determined to avoid any bank-specific development work, except for where it was necessary to carry on business, where the bank was contracted to provide certain functionality, or where there was a strategic angle to it, and ‘we more or less kept true to that,’ said Chin. However, development work still needed to be undertaken in two other areas, namely for regulatory requirements and for country specific features. ‘I think some of the challenges we faced were because TCS didn’t have a strong presence in Malaysia or nearby,’ he said. So there was work to do in both. Ambank was aware that some suppliers purported to offer Malaysian versions of their systems, but TCS wasn’t one of them. ‘Clearly that was our investment into it and it will benefit the next customer who comes along and takes Bancs.’ TCS also made plenty of investment, Chin noted, but the bank put in plenty of time and effort. This was even more the case for the teller front-end, Chin noting that ‘a lesson to learn is also to be a close second runner rather than the first’. Ambank’s contribution to this particular
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