In 2015 Path Solutions announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Nonprofit Fund for Development of Islamic Business and Finance, also known as IBFD, to jointly reach a collaborative working arrangement that includes the identification, promotion and selling of Path Solutions’ Islamic core banking system to financial institutions in Russia and CIS countries, enabling Islamic banking technology simulation, providing consulting services in the area of Islamic banking operations and products and other joint initiatives. Path Solutions has also entered into several strategic partnerships which seem to complement its suite of products. Some of the prominent partnerships listed by Path Solutions are Thomson Reuters as market data provider, SWIFT for financial telecommunications, Globe X Data for the cloud storage technology and Docuware as the document management system. It has tied up with Vasco for its internet and mobile banking authentication and IrisGuard for Iris based recognition.
Conclusion
Path has mostly made good headway over the years, helped by what is clearly strong Islamic banking support. From a firm Middle East base, Path moved into a host of new markets, from Africa to Asia Pacific to Europe. The system has broad functionality to support universal banking. In addition, on occasions (as at NBK), some modules are felt to be sufficiently functionally rich to be taken for specialist requirements.
That expansion continued, with further new country wins. The challenge looked to be to deliver on all of the sales successes, particularly given this rapid geographical expansion. There looked to be a danger of over-stretching, despite the vendor’s fairly heavy recruitment drive and the establishment of a direct presence in a number of new countries. Meanwhile, the Java rewrite of the system could further strengthen Path’s hand, stripping out the current proprietary Sybase technology, but this clearly took much longer than envisaged.
