in their quest for more automation. There was also another win in Iraq for BML in July 2010.
This was at Bank of Erbil, a start-up bank in Kurdistan. The bank considered a number of vendors before selecting ICBS, including ICS, ITS and Orion Infotech, a reseller for 3i Infotech. One of the reasons why Bank of Erbil selected BML, according to Halmat Omer, IT manager at the bank, was that BML had a large presence in the country. ‘BML has an office and good support,’ he stated. As a start-up, Bank of Erbil expected to be live with ICBS in three to four months. ‘We don’t need to migrate any data,’ said Omer.
Bank of Erbil planned to open with three branches and intended to open another three each year after (however, as of early 2015 it had only four sites, in Sulaimaniya, Baghdad, and Zakho - as wells as in Erbil). It took functionality for conventional banking (as opposed to Islamic, like Kurdistan International Bank) in the areas of trade, retail and commercial finance.
However, by this stage, a downturn in Middle Eastern activity was really starting to bite. After six new-name wins in the region in 2008 and 2009, this number dropped to three in 2010 and then just two in 2011 (this also meant fewer Islamic deals in this region in 2011 for BML than competitors ICS and Path). Hence, the first South-East Asian win for the vendor must have been greeted with some level of relief. The project was Islamic in focus, involved Heitech Padu and came at Malaysia- based Bank Simpanan Nasional (BSN), which boasted 400 branches and over nine million accounts. This was part of large-scale IT modernisation worth $32 million to replace its core banking platform. The solution was to cover conventional interest calculation and Islamic profit calculation, loans management, Islamic financing, transfers and payments, branch operations, integration and delivery channels, with a local software house to supply a loan origination application. The deal was won versus local vendors Infopro and Silverlake, although a number of large international vendors, including FIS, Oracle FSS and Temenos, also bid for the project at an earlier stage. This would be the bank’s second attempt to replace its legacy software, following a failed project to implement the SIB2000 core system from Italian vendor, Elsag. The selection process included a proof of concept, reference site visits to Commercial Bank of Kuwait and Bank of Jordan, and a visit to BML’s development site in Beirut. The official signing ceremony took place on 17th January 2012 and the project was planned for completion within two years. By mid-2013, Faddoul said the instalment of the customer
information system had been completed and the vendor was delivering the loans management application. Shortly after, UAT would take place and would run until December. By then, Faddoul said, ‘around two-thirds of the system will be delivered’. The following year, the focus would be on the deployment of the deposits application, system interfacing and branch automation, with a go-live date provisioned for July 2014. The two Middle Eastern deals for 2011 both came
in Lebanon at MENA Invest and Excillis Finance. This meant BML had gained two of the total of five deals up for grabs in its home territory during this year.
BML has seen the use of ICBS broadened at numerous
client sites in recent years too. In 2011, the operations of Lebanese Canadian Bank looked set to be transferred onto the ICBS solution as the bank was acquired by existing client, SocGen in Lebanon, following US suspicions of money laundering at the former. Then, early the following year, Commercial Bank of Kuwait also decided to broaden its use of ICBS, taking its treasury module to replace Spectrum from Financial Software Systems. This system was originally selected in 2004, around the same time as ICBS was chosen as its core solution. There was also progress at Arab Bank as its subsidiary, Arab Investment Bank, also in Lebanon, selected modules for core, shares, bonds, and Swift interfacing, with plans to go live later in the year. Around the same time, good news also came from another BLC Bank subsidiary, BLC Invest, which opted to implement modules of ICBS, as BLC Finance before it had done. Corporate-wise, as with any remaining privately held
company, there is the question of its continued independence. Faddoul was believed to have spoken to at least one interested buyer, Sungard in 2011, but feedback from a source close to the discussions was that the valuation placed on the company by the two parties varied widely, and Faddoul wanted to find a ‘safe home’ for ICBS, so that it would continue to be strategic and customers would continue to be supported. The vendor also gained two other ICBS deals in 2012. The first was at another SocGen location, Cyprus. As SocGen’s operations in Jordan and Lebanon had been running on ICBS for a number of years, ‘this venture is pretty much a replica of previous works at the corporation’, said Faddoul. The bank’s legacy system, Coreplus from local supplier, Probanx, was expected to be replaced with ICBS by April 2013. ICBS was brought in to cover all the retail and corporate functions, which comprised deposits, loans, trade finance (letters of credit, letters of guarantee and bills for collections) and foreign exchange.
While the additional business at SocGen was promising, Société Générale de Banque au Liban (SGBL) signed for Temenos’ T24 in mid-2014 for its subsidiary operations in Jordan and Cyprus as well as Lebanon. ICBS had been in place since 1994, said Gérard Garzuel, COO of the bank. The decision to replace was taken because the bank wanted ‘a flexible, cutting edge technology and easily parameterised banking solution that can be an asset to the expansion and the development of our banking activity around the region’, he explained. ‘We expect to be able to consolidate our regional operations and have a unified banking platform,’ he added. T24 should help the bank design new products and bring them to market quicker, ‘giving us a competitive advantage in a very challenging local and regional market’, he concluded. Whether this duly sees the replacement of ICBS in these locations remains to be seen. A source close to the project suggested in April 2015 that things had not moved forwards with the project and there might be some sort of review by the bank.
The second deal was at the aforementioned Lebanon-
based FNB (which had acquired ICBS user, MECG), which signed with BML to implement the ICBS capital markets
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