CASE STUDY
U
nited Bank for Africa (UBA) Plc is
a leading financial services group
in sub-Saharan Africa, with presence
in 20 African countries, as well as the
United Kingdom, the United States of
America and France.
From a single country operation founded
in 1949 in Nigeria, Africa’s largest
economy, UBA has emerged as a pan-
African provider of banking and other
financial services, to over 15 million
customers globally, through one of the
most diverse service channels in sub-Sahara
Africa; over 1,000 branches and customer
touch points, 2,400 ATMs, 13,500 PoS and a
robust online and mobile banking platform.
UBA was the first Nigerian bank to make
an Initial Public Offering (IPO), following
its listing on the NSE in1970. It was also
the first Nigerian bank to issue Global
Depository Receipts (GDRs). The shares of
UBA are publicly traded on the Nigerian
Stock Exchange (NSE) and the bank has a
well-diversified shareholder base, including
foreign and local institutional investors as
well as individual shareholders.
Overview
In April 2014, UBA embarked on a
major system upgrade to the latest
version of Finacle to simplify its processes
and significantly improve customer
experience across all channels. The
ambitious project envisaged a big bang
implementation in phases across UBA’s
operations in 19 countries.
Kennedy Uzoka, Group Managing Director,
UBA Group, said: “At UBA, we have always
looked to drive greater financial inclusion
across Africa. It has become vital for banks
to have a strong technology architecture in
place to provide a customer experience at
par with digital disruptors across channels
while accelerating innovations across new
business models.
“With Infosys Finacle, we now have a strong
digital suite that enables the bank to drive
growth while providing an exceptional
banking experience to our growing retail,
SME, institutional and corporate customers.”
Implementation highlights
The project involved a lot of complexities,
such as: migrating a data of 14TB for
Nigeria alone, migrating 5,000 plus
customisations, multilingual deployments
(English, French and Portuguese) and
training more than 11,000 users spread
over the African continent. The project scope covered implementation
of core banking, online banking and
treasury systems for the bank’s 19 country
operations. UBA was keen on a short
timeline, especially for the core banking and
online banking implementations.
The first country went live on Finacle within
a year of project commencement. The
remaining 18 rollouts in as many countries
were completed in the next 14 months.
The extremely quick implementation was
a result of meticulous planning, enabling
simultaneous roll outs across four countries. The 19 implementations – 10 French,
one Portuguese and eight English – were
grouped into five multi-entity deployments.
The bank was recommended to leverage
a data replication tool to replicate data to
ensure that they didn’t have to go through
an intermediate migration cycle.
Key business drivers The latter allowed UBA to undertake a
big bang migration to the latest version
of Finacle. Standardisation of migration,
porting and testing activities enabled
optimum utilisation of human and
other resources.
UBA realised it needed a state-of-the-
art banking platform to support its
transformation plans, which would enable it
THE EXTREMELY QUICK
IMPLEMENTATION WAS A RESULT
OF METICULOUS PLANNING.
to consolidate its strategic positioning and
capitalise on the extensive opportunities in
the African market. The chosen platform
would not only have to provide the desired
functionality but do so in several languages.
www.intelligentcio.com
The multilingual, multi-entity features of
Finacle made it an ideal choice.
Everything was meticulously planned and
particular attention was paid to predicting
major risks, their mitigation and backup
plans. A secure, shared portal was used for
tracking all requirements and issues online
helped to keep the rollout on track, despite
problems such as fuel shortages.
The bank’s internal team comprised a cross
functional permanent core of 48 staff and
another 65 members from key departments
such as; Operations, Information Technology,
Audit, Internal Control, Finance, Trade, Risk
Management, E-banking and Treasury, who
pitched in when required.
INTELLIGENTCIO
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