With the turmoil that has hit the banking sector, many players have been forced to turn to technology in order to cut costs. Sidian bank formerly K-Rep which was bought by Centum Investment has joined the fray of those banks which have invested in the digital transformation of their processes.
Today the bank announced it has turned to IBM Cloud and Cognitive solutions to aid in its digital transformation. This is expected to help the bank provide its growing customer base with faster access to existing services such as debit and credit card processing, bank account opening, tell services and wealth management.
The bank which was founded 1984 as a microfinance bank needed a core banking system that could provide it with a competitive edge as well as enhance its services to better target the entrepreneur market segment. It also wanted to reduce unplanned system outages. Prior to the new system about 40% of the business day was spent on problem isolation. However, the new system is able to learn from past incidents and resolve 56% of any difficulties with minimal human intervention. This has enabled the bank realize 34 percent savings in capital expenses and a 60 percent improvement in transactional times across all ATMs and teller counters.
Previously the bank’s core banking system was being run on legacy hardware, however all applications have now been migrated to IBM infrastructure through a cloud model which is live and fully operational. With the infrastructure managed services on IBM systems the availability, speed of access and expansion for applications has improved to 99 percent from an average of 84 percent on a given week.
Most often than not digitization comes with job loses, lets hope that the same won’t happen at Sidian.