FEATURE
is a process of settlement and reconciliation between the
systems. “It is an integrated system.”
The turnkey procurement process for the National
e-Payment Switch took three years, from April 2011 until
end of March 2014. The procurement contract was signed
with Banking Production Center BV in March 2014, for
only the National Switch and related Systems Application
Software part of the project. After completion of the
procurement process, from March to September 2014, the
internal Function Specification Document was prepared.
“This was a natural project to connect all the banks into a
common switch, and to offer additional services to some
of the banks that may not have the technology. It was
won on the merits of SmartVista,” comments BPC’s Bertini.
“A lot of countries today do not have the national switch.
There are a lot of initiatives from the World Bank and
governments and other organisations to make sure those
countries provide a national switch.”
Angelo Bertini, Managing Director, Spain, Middle East,
North & West Africa, BPC Banking Technologies.
Top trends
• Banks looking to provide new features for
customers, cost savings
• Banks want flexible and innovative products
from vendors
• BPC usually works direct, in some countries we
use partners
• Costing a lot to maintain legacy systems in
banks
• Ethiopia switch project won on basis of merits of
SmartVista
• First stage in Africa is to interconnect all banks
• For vendors opportunities are around cost
savings
• General trend is most banks are looking for
better technology
• Lot of countries today do not have the national
switch
• Mobile money is an opportunity in Africa
• Satellite latency and hops do not make a
difference for banking
• Time to market is a key issue for banks
• Very expensive to add and change functionality
in legacy systems
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INTELLIGENTCIO
The SmartVista solution from BPC is hosted in the
EthSwitch datacentre. The EthSwitch datacentre contains
storage, network, and security technologies from various
vendors including Oracle, Cisco, EMC, Thales, and others.
The scope of implementation originally covered
19 commercial banks. During the process of
implementation, two banks were merged into one,
and the number was reduced to 18 commercial banks.
The scope of work also included the central bank and
therefore the project required 19 interfaces for the
switch. Out of the eighteen banks, 6 banks had their
own switch; another 6 banks were connected using
their core banking application; and the last 6 banks
used a common consortium shared switch. This existing
situation was integrated into the platform at the time of
implementation and testing.
BPC was the prime contractor for the switch and related
software solution. The implementation was started in
September 2014. For BPC the scope of the project was
mainly on the software side. This included deployment
and implementation of interfaces with all the banks.
Stresses Bekele, “It is a complex task. It is not just
deploying the software and making it work.” For BPC it
was almost literally as many implementations as there
were banks. Each of the six banks with their own switch
had to be individually integrated into EthSwitch. For the
six banks using their individual core banking system,
integration had to be done individually again. And finally
the consortium switch had to be integrated.
On the other side of the switch interface a common
messaging standard ISO 8583 had to be set up and
integrated across the different technologies used by the
individual banks. Another part of the implementation
requirement was fo