bank slowed the project down a bit because of the economic meltdown in Zimbabwe’. George Nyashanu, managing director at TN Bank, added: ‘We were very fortunate we were able to raise the funds required... Our rationale is that we’re still confident that Zimbabwe will recover, and we have to be prepared for this time.’ Mapuranga reported that, a few months after going live, the system had not been down at all. He relayed that ‘there’s nothing fundamental that needs to be changed’, while admitting that ‘the bank is still trying to tune some of our reports’. TN Bank had abandoned its old systems, since these were using Zimbabwean dollars. Since February 2009, foreign currency had been permitted for domestic use. Rubikon was attracting attention, according to Hayward,


from within Zimbabwe but also elsewhere, in Europe and in Asia. In Zimbabwe, ‘we’re expecting to get a firm order for Rubikon from a government-related bank’, he said in August 2008, although Neptune was awaiting the outcome of ‘current discussions’. Neptune was also bidding with Rubikon at financial institutions in South Eastern Europe, in Kosovo, Macedonia and Croatia. ‘We’ve also showcased it at some banks in the UK.’ This included, in the first half of August, two building societies, as well as ‘a bank in the Docklands’. To extend its reach, Neptune had been concentrating on finding suitable partners. The first partner to be announced was Petra Financial, at the end of July. Neptune signed to incorporate Petra’s Vortex payments solution. According to Goodrich, ‘we see Petra as in the pre-transaction space’. A partnership with Power Payment Technologies followed. Based in Luxembourg, it is an international payments solutions firm. The focus of this partnership, said Goodrich, was on the post-transaction space, ‘for exceptions and investigations, and they also have some AML functionality’. Neptune was also building a relationship with a Cambodian systems integrator, Campura Systems.


The second win for Rubikon came in mid-October 2008 at mid-sized Kenyan player, Victoria Commercial Bank (VCB). VCB has a focus on corporate customers. According to Ene, VCB started looking for a replacement for Microbanker earlier in the year, and settled on Neptune in early September. It was a ‘closed tender, so to speak’, Ene explained. ‘VCB didn’t advertise to all comers but started off with a shortlist of all the vendors who are active in the market’. These included Infosys and Temenos as well as I-flex and Neptune. The selection process involved proposals and then a couple of presentations. ‘I think Rubikon had the edge,’ said Ene, ‘primarily because it was a brand new product, offering better technology and more integration. The bank had very specific requirements. I think they felt in the end Rubikon was able to address these requirements better than the competing products.’ As an example of this, Ene cited VCB’s practice of using


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couriers to pick up cheques from corporate customers to save them a visit to the bank. ‘What they were actually looking for is for clients to initiate the process with internet or mobile banking, with everything getting tracked and recorded on the system.’ The workflow and case management functionality of Rubikon, Ene believed, was well suited.


While Ene acknowledged the risk that VCB was running by selecting Rubikon over an older system, ‘the risk was mitigated by the fact that Neptune is very active in the market. We have 30-odd customers in the region, including about seven in Kenya. They spoke to some of those clients. By looking at our track-record, they got as much comfort as they needed out of that’. The project at VCB was expected to take about three months, starting in earnest in early 2009. Neptune and VCB would spend until then planning the project, with the hope that this would pave the way for a straightforward implementation. Win number three was at the end of 2008 from National Saving and Credit Bank (NatSave), a government-owned bank in Zambia. Felix Sithole, IT manager at the bank, said there was a lengthy tendering process (as a public bank, it is bound by procurement laws) before choosing Rubikon. The selection team ‘looked at quite a number of packages over a period of time’, going back to well before the tender started. ‘There are certain functionalities we particularly like about Rubikon, which is a very state of the art package,’ he said. He highlighted the workflow-oriented nature of the solution as well as the fact that there is no dedicated end-of-day batch processing. Moreover, ‘from what we saw, this was the only genuinely web-based package’. Sithole, as the project leader for the bank, acknowledged that during the selection process there was a perceived risk with choosing an unproven solution. ‘That came out quite strongly,’ he said, ‘I really had to explain how we were going to manage that risk’. The bank drew comfort from visits to reference sites for Equinox and it also visited TN Bank. ‘We visited when it was on the point of converting to Rubikon,’ he said. Due to the timing, this allowed his team to witness the training going on at the Harare-based bank. This combination ‘is what gave us comfort’. A ‘sizeable amount of time’ had been spent on contract


wording. ‘We do anticipate that, should anything go wrong, ultimately we will be able to fall back on various clauses in the agreement.’ For similar reasons, Sithole said the implementation team would give due care to issues such as project management and training, ‘to make sure as much as possible that we do not have even the normal teething problems for a project of this size. This is a new package, so we have to do it right.’


In fact, NatSave went out to tender for a replacement system during 2013. The process ended due to concerns about


Universal Banking Systems Market Report | www.ibsintelligence.com


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