‘We spent six months between having the RFP, doing gap analysis and vendor registrations.’
Indeed, the first stage of selection included a list of 15 vendors, all offering Islamic software. This first round was filtered by experience. It was reduced first to five vendors and then to a shortlist of three. These were Infosys, TCS Financial Solutions and Temenos.
A specialist consultancy firm provided assistance
throughout the selection process. As such, Aloufi said that ‘we went through a very professional selection’.
The vendors were provided a demonstration script, which Alinma’s selection team asked them to feed through the solutions they were proposing.
‘We asked them to apply the script to their system and run it in front of us,’ he explained.
References were also sought, and were given prominence based on the premium that the bank was attaching to the experience in the Islamic field each vendor had.
Temenos provided Al Salam Bank in Bahrain as a reference. ‘We believe that we selected the best vendor,’ said Aloufi, emphasizing ‘the flexibility and stability of the product, and its coverage of most of the functionality’.
Having won the deal, Temenos signed to provide T24 at the end of 2007. Alinma purchased all available modules of T24. This included one or two modules which were seen at the time as extraneous to the bank’s requirements, such as for asset management and mutual funds. This hints at the reality that the budget for the project was not the most important criterion during the selection process.
‘We only opened the budget after the technical evaluation,’ Aloufi pointed out. The strategy was to consider the budget during the contract negotiation with Temenos.
‘It was
important, but not that important,’ he explained, ‘because we wanted a system that covers all lines of business’.
Implementation The implementation started at the beginning of 2008.
Both bank and vendor provided resources for the project, and third parties, typically freelance consultants, were also involved.
Three freelance business consultants were hired by Alinma, and its own staff, of which there were about 15 people, was a mix of experienced individuals and ‘fresh graduates’.
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Temenos’ staff trained the bank workers to familiarize them with T24, with the graduates amongst them having done ‘a very good job’, said Aloufi.
Alinma also hired a consultant capable of understanding Temenos’ applications. This individual helped in carrying out the implementation too, ‘because the project is varied and covering most of the bank’s products’.
The end-users at the bank were involved in testing. This Aloufi felt particularly important since some of the Islamic products had not previously been processed through T24.
The bank opted for IBM AIX for hardware. Oracle provided a clustered database and general ledger.
Numerous things needed to be interfaced to T24. IVR (Interactive Voice Response), internet banking, risk and teller applications are among those Aloufi named.
A further aspect to the project was the implementation and interfacing of ARC, Temenos’ pre-integrated front office suite, with the bank deciding to do a lot of modifications, enhancing the ARC modules in T24 ‘to serve the bank and meet our requirements’.
(ARC is no longer sold by Temenos and instead the vendor offers the Temenos Connect digital channels platform.)
The implementation project involved a long-standing local integrator, and was divided into two phases. The first phase, which lasted until October 2008, was for corporate and treasury modules. And the second phase was for retail.
Further work done after the soft launch. This was necessary either because the product roster had been added to, or because in some cases not all of the gaps in functionality identified had been fixed.
User acceptance testing (UAT) finished in February 2009 ahead of the soft launch in March of that year. The project team also did a fair amount of customization, but only in the customization layer, with the tools provided as standard, as opposed to the core. This was particularly focused on the interfaces.
Go-live
The soft launch went ahead in March 2009 and all was ‘fine’, said Aloufi. The system remained closed to the public, but employees of the bank participated.
The soft launch was run out of the head office as opposed to the branches, after which the bank continued to enhance
Islamic Report
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