Additional Bankfusion take-up


By this stage, Bankfusion had gained six users, three for Bankfusion Universal Banking and three for Bankfusion Equation. In addition to Standard Bank and CRDB Bank in Tanzania, Misys had gained a Bankfusion Universal Banking contract with Actinver in Mexico. Warren flagged it as a very significant deal, as this was a brand new customer for Misys (so not from the Bankmaster fold). ‘It wasn’t a quiet little deal, we had all our major competitors there,’ he said. Actinver was a new banking entrant, with big ambitions and a tight schedule, so it required a supplier with ‘strong project discipline’ and a system that was straightforward to implement and easy to configure to quickly bring new products to market. ‘Our competitors did everything they could, including dropping the price,’ said Warren. ‘But we didn’t have to do that and we are delighted to have won this deal.’ He cited ‘a vendor from Switzerland’ as its main rival for this project (Temenos, of course). The contract was signed in mid-December 2009, with the go-live scheduled for Summer 2010, said Mark Winterburn, VP, solutions management and product development, banking and TCM. Meanwhile, CRDB Bank was in the final user acceptance testing stages, and would go live ‘in the next few months’. It would become the second live site for Bankfusion Universal Banking, version 1.4, following on from Standard Bank Zimbabwe. The Bankfusion Equation takers that had signed by this


time were Investec in South Africa and London, Piraeus Bank in Greece and Qatar National Bank in Qatar, all of which were existing Equation users. The emphasis was particularly on streamlining processes around customer on-boarding. Where Bankfusion was starting to be applied to Midas, this was more for streamlining deal input. There were also ‘one or two completely new-name deals in the pipeline’, said Winterburn. However, he emphasised that priority would be given to the existing clients of Misys, ‘which have been patiently waiting their turn to move away from old systems, rather than going after every RFP’. The vendor had invested a lot of money and effort on creating templates for conversion from Bankmaster to Bankfusion, ‘making as many things repeatable as possible’. Plus, it offered an incentive in terms of costs for banks, pricing the new system as an upgrade rather than a new licence. Warren admitted that many Misys clients were disillusioned with the vendor’s products and promises of upgrades that had never materialised (such as BankmasterPlus and EquationPlus) ‘We were not likely to get a glowing reference from our users,’ he said. However, thanks to the sweeping restructuring of the business over the previous three years, replacing many development executives, investing in new products and tools, as well as introducing rigorous customer satisfaction checks, Warren believed that Misys’ fortunes had reversed. The total number of implementation projects going on at once would be constrained. ‘We are very careful – we make sure we commit fully to every project. It will do us a great deal of harm, considering how much work we’ve done on building up our


reputation in the last three years, to have the project get away from us. So, there is a limit on how fast we can grow in terms of numbers of implementations we tackle in one go.’ The plan was that as one project was completed, the vendor could start two new ones. No project would last longer than twelve months. Thus, the expectation was to double customer numbers every twelve months. Somewhat ironically, not long after expressing these sentiments, in March 2010, Warren departed Misys to become COO of FTSE Group. Al-Noor Ramji, non-executive director at Misys, stepped into the vacated EVP and general manager role. Ramji had been CIO at BT and had held senior positions at Credit Suisse First Boston, Swiss Bank Corporation and Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, among others, so was a high- profile appointment.


The pivotal cutover of Bankfusion at CRDB Bankin Tanzania happened over the long Easter weekend 2010. The deadline had been pushed back from the revised planned go-live in March to allow more time to iron out any issues. ‘If anything goes wrong, we have time to take care of it,’ said Pedersen, ahead of the cutover. Having been through such migrations, he was aware that there would be issues but there had been extensive testing. The original cutover was scheduled for the previous November. ‘These things will always take more time, you always tend to be overly positive. No harm has been done and it is best to be as prepared as possible, so long as it doesn’t cost a lot,’ said Pedersen. Misys had been ‘very supportive, it is very keen that we will be a success’ so there had been little additional cost for the bank. A failure would be very difficult for Misys, said Pedersen, because there were a lot of banks waiting to see what would happen at CRDB. Although the system had been live for some time at Standard Bank in Zimbabwe, he did not think there was much comparison as it is a small operation. CRDB had 65 branches and more than one million accounts. The cutover was meant to be a ‘big bang’, with Bankmaster switched off ahead of the next working day. Pedersen confirmed that Bankfusion would actually cover more areas than Bankmaster at the outset and, indeed, extra functionality had been added over the last six months that would not have been in place if the original go- live date had been met. This had been in the credit area and customer definition and segmentation, with CRDB keen to do this to a more detailed level than was initially feasible. Another long-standing Bankmaster user to sign was


Time Bank. It had its banking licence revoked by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe in 2004. The bank’s executives denied claims that it was insolvent and had recently succeeded in gaining a court ruling overturning the decision. A number of other banks, closed at the same time, had also been successful in being reinstated. However, Time Bank still had challenges. It claimed that millions of dollars worth of its assets seized in 2004 by the central bank had not been returned.


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