felt. ‘We are launching in Angola as a research opportunity,’ he said. ‘Angola is a big target, we are looking to expand our market share.’ The project start date was delayed due to what Agu described as ‘BMI wishing to complete some end-of-year tasks’ but was rescheduled for the first week in October. Around the same time, Neptune gained another win in


Kenya, at IDB. This institution supports industrial development in the country through medium to long-term financing of enterprises in various sectors of the economy. The drive for a new system came in with its new managing director, James Ochami. He was banking director at Housing Finance which had been an Equinox user for the previous four years. When he joined, IDB was using Temenos’ Globus. According to George Agu, ‘the bank realised the product could do less than 50 per cent of some of the ideas Ochami was bringing on board’. IDB decided to replace its software and went out to tender in October 2006. ‘The key considerations for the bank were functionality and flexibility,’ said Agu. The live date was set as the start of October, following a three month implementation. In the same country, Agricultural Finance Corporation (AFC) went live at around the same time as part of the bank’s re- engineering initiatives. The state-owned agricultural credit institution had a network of 32 branches. It is one of the key economic institutions


receiving major support from the


Kenyan government. Its main objective is to assist in the development of agriculture and agricultural industries by making loans to farmers and co-operative societies. By this stage (late 2007) Neptune was claiming more than 20 implementations in the Comesa (Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa) region. It brought in eleven new name Equinox deals in 2007 and bucked the trend in 2008 with 18 Equinox deals, with a large portion being new banks in Nigeria. All but three were here, with the exceptions coming in Uganda (Global Trust Bank and Mercantile Credit Bank) and Tanzania (Tujijenje Bank). A lot of the Nigerian deals are at the microfinance level, for a version of its system dubbed Orbit tailored for this sector. Another new management team came in during 2008.


Tasked with leading the firm in the international market-place was Patrick Hayward as managing director. He had spent 25 years in the banking software community, including time at Gulf Bank, Bank of America and Midland. He had also worked at Internet Systems, London Bridge and GoldenSource. Alan Goodrich, in channels and indirect sales, and Paul Carty, in direct sales, joined Hayward’s executive team. Stacey Small also joined as a senior sales executive, having worked in sales for both Fiserv and Misys, as well as at Lloyds TSB and Barclays.


Rubikon and Orbit-R


By late 2006, it was clear that development of the new Supernova product was taking longer than expected and it would not, as intended, be launched during this year. Neptune opened up a development centre in Lagos to increase resources to try to reduce time to market. In December 2006, Neptune also entered into an agreement with Indian outsourcing company, Cordiant in Chennai, to provide offshore development resources, particularly in the areas of regulatory reporting and monitoring systems. A small number of developers and business analysts were laid off in the UK in May 2007.


The new system, now dubbed Rubikon, was officially unveiled in late 2007. The original launch date was missed as the vendor wanted ‘to improve on the system functionality’, said sales consultant, Sujay Nanjashetty. The vendor claims some specific differentiating features for the system. Workflow is part of the core, and Shah felt that Rubikon was ‘the only banking solution to have this’. He claimed this was ‘one of the biggest plus-points of the system’, as there is ‘no need for a bank to invest in a third party workflow system’. Alongside the workflow system is the third party rules engine Drools, from JBoss. This engine can be integrated with an Excel template. This means that when a bank wants to change or add to its business rules, it can do this via a spreadsheet rather than hard


288


coding. ‘This will then be read into the system and become a rule-set as part of the database tables,’ explained Shah. Nanjashetty claimed that this makes the system more


flexible. ‘A bank can set and change its own business without the developer. This reduces the total cost of ownership for the system.’ This rules engine also means the bank can tailor the system to meet any regulatory need it might have in any country it operates in. The Java-based Rubikon is browser- based and has a SOAP interface layer, meaning it can work with third party systems. Its BPEL engine means that it can also ‘integrate the disparate systems within the bank into one core system’, said Shah. The system also has an interesting way of dealing with language variation. It has one source code base that will look for a text file depending on the locale of the browser being used. If the browser is set for the default language to be French for one user and English for another, for instance, the system will recognise this and bring up the user screen in the appropriate language for each user. Further functionality of note is the module covering management metrics. This layer has been designed to give an executive overview of the bank’s performance against set targets. These targets can be changed to offer high level predictions for future performance in a ‘what if’ scenario. The


Universal Banking Systems Market Report | www.ibsintelligence.com


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