Vandana Shiva, author, and Indian scholar, once said: “Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being”. The same goes for innovation, for not only is the core of every technology, but also the preliminary intangible phase that brings technologies out to light. That being said, we should mention that innovation is not just limited to technology, in fact, it extends to more than just that.

Believing in its importance and how vital it can be to businesses, Suez Canal Bank (SCB) has adopted innovation to be its companion during its transformation journey. This revamp project is a major undertaking for the bank which targets to add new 500,000 customers for the to-be-opened 50 new branches. It is to help streamline the bank’s processes and solution landscape by integrating the current applications into a modern core banking platform.

The primary objective of the revamp project is to replace the bank’s existing core applications with a modern core banking platform. The bank wanted to build digital capabilities, shorten the time-to-market, achieve straight-through processing, reduce manual intervention, enhance processing efficiency, and minimize operational costs. Eventually, this would help future-proof the bank’s technology landscape and augment its regulatory and cross-border compliance capabilities.

Drivers of Change

To align with SCB’s strategic objectives of growth, expansion, and improved customer experience, there was a need for the bank’s technology landscape to support its objectives and help meet changing customer and business needs as well as evolving local regulations and compliance. Modifications needed to be made on SCB’s traditional core banking database (Temenos T24 core banking system using traditional J-Base (XML Flat File-based DB) which was in use for 15 years and was unable to support the bank’s new requirements and objectives.

Over a period of 15 years, the traditional system has undergone numerous transformations based on the changing needs of the bank. However, many limitations began to surface as banking became more dependent on technology which in turn highlighted the bank’s need to evolve.

The key drivers for the replacement of SCB’s traditional core banking system:

• Branch and Addition new accounts – The traditional system limited the number of customers’ accounts existed. Also, the allocation of these emerged as a significant challenge as the numerical range of accounts is nearing exhaustion.
• Lack of Key Features – Unavailability of key features that were critical to evolving business requirements. These key features include stopping payments, group limits, value dating, customer segment level pricing, KYC updates, customer screening, and a host of Islamic banking functionalities among others.
• High Enhancement and Customization Efforts – Changes to the traditional system to comply with regulations and to add new products, which required significant effort in development and testing. The resulting long time-to-market for the bank gave competitors an edge in launching similar products faster.

The SCB Challenges

• SCB was operating on Temenos T24 core banking system using traditional J-Base (XML Flat File-based DB). Over time, functional and technical limitations started to surface. Later we found out that the core banking platform was not well-integrated with the bank’s auxiliary systems; consecutively support costs were escalating.
• Existing customizations did not scale well, causing inefficiencies and preventing SCB from leveraging new technologies.
• SCB’s traditional setup that didn’t provide the level of application awareness needed.
• SCB depended on an obsolete technology that emulates the disk-based storage which leads to losing all disk-based backup storage, in addition to not applying any encryption on the backup storage.
• The data protection solution was not isolated on a separate hardware and coexisted with the production VMs on the same servers.
• There was no replication for backup images which was a high risk.

Ultimately the bank’s ability to bring new products to market was severely limited. Hence, SCB embarked on this technology revamp journey to upgrade the new version of T24 services and user experience allowing branches and users Web Access as well as boosting performance. In addition to migrating the database underpinning all core banking operations to a more cost-efficient and better-performing platform, without compromising the integrity of customers’ data.

ICT Misr’s Solution

We identified the best combination of technology in Relational Database and Data Protection and Security to cut IT costs and improve business performance. Along with the replacement of core banking and internet banking systems, additional dependent streams under the project included:

• Adoption of Database Technology – The bank needed to catch up with the latest market technologies and leverage the benefits of more contemporary solutions. This was essential to support the future-focused outlook of the bank, both from a functional and technical perspective. Besides, the bank needed to tackle its traditional system’s lack of compatibility and reliability.
• Backup Solution – The bank had to start using the right backup solution where Data backup is an essential disaster recovery procedure and should be undertaken on a regular basis. In addition, regular backups should take place as a form of insurance policy against disaster, theft, or cyber-attacks.

ICT Misr Provided:

• Relational Database (Oracle)

The value of this technology is providing a variety of techniques to store and retrieve data. It also acts as an efficient handler to balance the requirements of multiple applications using the same data as well as integrity constraints to get a high level of protection that prevents access to prohibited data and grants concurrent data access in a way that only a single user can access the same data at a time. In addition to mitigating a number of problems that complicate support for vendors and SCB IT staff.

• Backup and Data Protection Solution (Veritas)

A backup appliance that is used to replicate Backup images between Main and DR sites using optimized bandwidth as there is a built-in WAN optimization in the backup appliance that enables restoring Main site backup from the DR site smoothly in addition to the in-flight encryption which complies with CBE regulations.

Knowing that today’s game name is “short-term cost savings”, pursuing application awareness has to demonstrate the visibility, improved context-based information protection, and improved management capabilities as well as immediate cost savings and return-on-investment.

That is how ICT Misr had an outstanding role while tailoring its solutions to SCB. Thanks to those solutions, the bank could build a truly customer-centric environment which in turn helped it maintain:

1-High-Level Business Impact which in turn secured the following:

• A single source of truth for all customers’ data.
• Real-time and analytical customer data that drive real-time decision-making.
• Quick implementation of a customer experience-centric offering at a fraction of the cost substantially reducing the risk of disruption.
• Business insights capitalizing on the historical data of SCB customer’s activity to promote new products.

2- IT Operation Impact granted:

• Increasing database performance boosts business productivity up to 10 times.
• Cutting database batch processing time from 50 hours to 3.
• Greater visibility and control over Oracle license use
• Provisioning new services in hours rather than weeks, accelerating time to market and making the bank more responsive to changing market demands.