thinking about making a large investment, but we took the strategic decision to go ahead to fix the core and get our technology in shape so that by the time the downturn was over we’d be ready to take off.’ Qatar would be the first site, with UAE scheduled for mid-2012 and other sites over the following twelve months. Mashreq went live in Qatar in November 2011. The bank had chosen to work directly with Oracle, rather than with a third party service provider. Johan de Meyer, CIO at Mashreq Bank, probably echoed the sentiments of many when he said, in late 2012: ‘based on my experience, with this size of implementation, I’d always work with the supplier itself’. The team, across bank and supplier, was around 250 staff, on a roughly 40:60 basis. If there are problems, a supplier such as Oracle has the ability to add experienced resources at short notice. Oracle played the role of system integrator at Mashreq Bank and ‘did a fantastic job’, said De Meyer (who was ex-AXA Bank, where he’d also headed a Flexcube roll-out). Mashreq Bank had an estimated 30,000 man-days of customisation on Flexcube. This was bound to happen, De Meyer felt, and in this instance much of the work stemmed from the relative lack of depth of Islamic banking support in Flexcube. Mashreq Bank was ‘very insistent’ that the customisations would be rolled back into the standard version of Flexcube to avoid potential future problems when it came to upgrading. For testing, Mashreq Bank didn’t work with a specialist for the first, relatively small implementation, in Qatar, and this was a key lesson, so that it appointed India- based Thinksoft for subsequent roll-outs. ‘They did a very good job,’ said De Meyer. The bank cut over in UAE in November 2012. There was also good news from China in the latter part


of 2011 as it was reported that Ping An Bank, a joint stock commercial bank based in Shenzhen, had gone live on Flexcube. Chet Kamat, CEO and managing director of Oracle FSS, stated that there was a net deviation of just three weeks from the original plan of the one and a half year project, claiming that the bank viewed this as a ‘miracle’. Ping An signed for Flexcube in March 2010 to replace a home-grown legacy solution. ‘China is one of the most promising and important markets for Flexcube,’ said Kamat, adding that ‘foreign vendors have not been very successful in China in the past, but with our track-record we hope that we will fill the need for a reliable, localised core banking solution in China’. Around the same time, China-based IT consultancy, ZTHT International, and Flexcube specialist, JMR Infotech, joined forces to work on two further Flexcube projects in China, at Fudian Bank and ER Bank. Both deployments were part of a larger project with CUFS, a local outsourcing company that intended to offer Flexcube on an ASP basis from its data centre to small and medium-sized financial institutions in China. When looking for standout deals, Wells Fargo would certainly seem to meet the criteria. It signed in 2011 for Flexcube to support its corporate and commercial banking business worldwide. The bank had a network of 30+ offices, employing


2700 staff and managing business in 130 countries. ‘Flexcube will introduce enhanced functionality for more effective branch liquidity management, position management, foreign exchange, customer profile management, funds transfer, customer accounts and customer liquidity solutions,’ said Judd Holroyde, SVP and head of global product management and delivery at Wells Fargo. Flexcube offered Wells Fargo a flexible architecture to enable scale, adaptability and platform growth, Holroyde added.


By Autumn 2013 the system had been implemented in


Canada, albeit still some time away from when customers would use it, according to Holroyde. At that stage, the next group of countries for implementation had not been decided. The project was instead focused on building interfaces between Flexcube and the home-grown systems at the bank. The first two products to be offered on the system, which was being built in the US, would be commercial lending and in-market treasury management. The idea was that the bank would be able to offer the same commercial banking services outside the US as inside. Alizz Islamic Bank in Oman took Flexcube ahead of


Temenos’ T24, Infosys’ Finacle and Path Solutions’ iMAL. Flexcube was found by the bank to be the most comprehensive and flexible solution in the space. Flexcube is deployed at the bank but the data centre is hosted by a specialist, Oman Data Park. Also outsourced is a credit card management system, to Arab Financial Services, and part of the Flexcube implementation was also outsourced, with testing functions carried out by Maveric Systems. Installed alongside Flexcube were various systems from NCR including an ATM solution, IVR and Agent Desktop solutions, and debit card and cheque book issuance. There is also an Islamic credit card solution. The bank’s IT infrastructure is connected to Swift as well as the local RTGS, ACH and electronic cheque clearing system. The bank, which is targeting retail, commercial and corporate customers, officially opened in the first week of October 2013. Oracle FSS’s largest deal in 2013 was with South Africa-


based Nedbank. Nedbank tied up with Ecobank to align their branch networks across Africa. Ecobank had signed in 2006 to replace Temenos’ Globus with Flexcube as part of an expansion strategy that was initiated to ‘help turn Ecobank into a world-class bank’. Globus supported the majority of operations of Ecobank and was deployed on a distributed basis. This was one aspect the project team wanted to address. Centralisation was seen as a key step towards aligning the bank’s practices with international best practices. ‘Staying with Temenos would have been the easiest option,’ said Arnold Ekpe, the bank’s CEO, ‘but our task was to find the best option, not the easiest one.’ In addition to the core system, Ecobank also took Flexcube Direct, comprising mobile and internet banking applications, and Oracle Financial Services Risk Analytics. The first recipients of Flexcube and the auxiliary systems


were Ecobank’s subsidiaries in Nigeria, Ghana, Benin and Togo. Flexcube was adapted to meet the regulatory requirements on a local and regional level, including those of The West African


Universal Banking Systems Market Report | www.ibsintelligence.com 311


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