Nowadays, the current competitive environment coupled with increasingly demanding customers is forcing banks, regardless of size, to use the latest banking technology. This core banking replacement process can either result in the bank leapfrogging to a high degree of differentiation, enabling it to compete on the customer experience and new product offering, or it can create huge risks for the bank if the transition is not managed properly.
As a result, the core replacement decision is often considered one of the riskiest and costliest IT projects a bank takes on. Another challenge facing financial institutions is standardising their operations. As many banks are comfortable using their legacy systems, they often tend to add modules from numerous vendors which results in having over-burdened systems that can potentially crash.
Out with the old
ICSFS has been providing banking and financial solutions for over two decades; its first packaged banking solution was launched in the early 1990s and has been awarded and recognised for excellence since. Its flagship, ICS BANKS solution, is parameterised so clients can quickly put to use the features they need with minimal time, risk, effort, and cost. ICSFS has recently faced a core banking replacement challenge with its new customer (Group of Banks), which consisted of replacing many legacy systems, one of which was an in-house system, and 25 banking satellite systems. The main requirements for the group were a fully-fledged bank-in-a-box solution that provides a full range of modules and also incorporates a flexible group model.
[C]ore replacement decision is often considered one of the riskiest and costliest IT projects a bank takes on
ICSFS’ philosophy has always entailed providing international standards packaged as an Off-the-Shelf (OTS) product with the value added capability of tailoring the product to consider local and country specific requirements. With this, the system flexibility starts from the outset. One of the company’s customers has witnessed a merger with four other banks that were successfully integrated and went live in three and a half months. They are now operating as a consolidated group.
Another record-breaking project completed was for a large bank in Nigeria, for nine banks mergers of which each bank had a different core banking system totalling to around 300 branches. ICSFS has also accomplished vanilla core banking implementations within weeks for several customers.
Operating in competitive market
In order to compete in today’s financial marketplace, once implemented a core banking solution should be robust, scalable, efficient, flexible, and serves for a long time. This is so banks can avoid an entire core replacement, which can take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Bank customers are also becoming increasingly demanding. Many expect all information to be in real-time and integrated, regardless of the channel being used. That is why ICSFS invests in its products to meet all current and future needs of the banks and financial institutions.
Today ICS BANKS is running 24/7. This service is also scalable to measure that ICSFS had a benchmark for its system with IBM in France, and it attained unmatched performance results. This reflects ICS BANKS’ agility to provide high levels of operational efficiency, meeting end users’ ever-changing demands and evolving business requirements, and delivering powerful banking solutions designed for use by the world’s largest banks.
It is fully empowered by Oracle’s latest technologies and products that furnish the system with the newest technology and infrastructure trends. ICSFS was the first in the whole region to move its system to oracle 10g, then to Oracle 11g, and now it recently moved to Oracle 12c, which is the latest.
ICSFS has received many awards for being a creative and excellent solutions provider. It is present in 31 countries, three continents, and its client base includes 81 customers that are all running banks or financial institutions. More than 70 percent of ICSFS’ clients are in Asia, 21 percent in Africa, and eight percent are in Europe. After 33 years of non-stop effort, ICSFS’ vision is always to be on top among other solution providers and to keep its systems at an international level.
