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Medium-sized bank in Central-Europe

Client Overview

The bank, newly established is about to start its operations in a central-European country by the end of August 2010 with FLEXCUBE providing its core banking application. The main modules are CORE, CASA, TD, CL, FX, MM, SI, NR, XP along with an internet banking interface, workflow interface, payment system and loan origination system. Implementation Size

As a start-up bank, the management positioned itself as a mid-size bank with basic operations in Teller, Deposits, Funds Transfer, Treasury and Consumer Lending Modules.

Project Overview

The project consisted of the following steps:

  • Training the Bank’s users in understanding FLEXCUBE.
  • Gathering requirements for a Consumer Lending Module.
  • Identifying gaps and workarounds for a CL module.
  • Addressing the complex requirements for a CL module.
  • Setting up of a CL module in FLEXCUBE.
Services Rendered

Our team has helped the bank overcome these challenges by deploying FLEXCUBE experts on-site. Our consultants have provided the following services:

  • Conducted an assesment study for the CL module.
  • Identified gaps within the Bank’s requirements.
  • Identified workarounds to manage the requirements without new enhancements and resulting in significant reductions in cost and efforts required.
  • Prepared specifications for a CL module.
  • Provided guidance to accounting / finance team of the Bank for setting up their accounting requirements. Helped to understand the functional requirements and mapped them to the FLEXCUBE application.
  • Prepared and documented parameter sheets for a CL module.
  • Provided guidance to the Bank’s employees in CL product setup as specific to their products.
  • Prepared business scenarios for functional testing of the CL module.
  • Executed Test Scenarios for the CL module.
  • Provided test support and clarification of parameterization issues.
  • Effectively communicated and provided follow-up with OFSS for bugs found during testing.
  • Evaluated and Retested the fixes provided by OFSS.
Challenges

Bank staff, being newly established, had very little exposure to including: Central Bank regulations, Central Bank reporting and core banking application framework. As a result, our consultants provided the following:

  • Core banking application framework
  • FLEXCUBE

The Bank’s users had strict deadlines with multiple tasks. The primary task preparation of product documentation for each banking segment. For most of the time, users are tied up with discussions and meetings in order to develop their product offerings, market research, etc which results in additional training challenges from the application perspective.

The Bank finalized the General Ledger setup, uploaded it into FLEXCUBE and the setup was done on top of the uploaded GL account structure. Later, the Bank, along with KPMG consultants, identified serious gaps in the GL set-up and re-created the GL accounts. This resulted in the re-parametering of the products. Our consultants managed it efficiently within the original timeframe, avoiding the delay and further cascading effect in the project schedule.

Lessons learned

Since users were new to banking, instead of starting with FLEXCUBE training, our consultants provided training on basic banking, banking application framework and then proceeded with normal FLEXCUBE training. With this method, users were able to understand the FLEXCUBE application more thoroughly and sooner.

Since the users were busy with their normal tasks, we prepared a flexible training calendar with multiple sessions every day. The users had the option to plan and choose different training sessions every day based on their other tasks. This relieved the pressure on the users, and helped them meet their deliverables and, at the same time, they received quality training on FLEXCUBE.

In order to obtain the specifications, our consultants prepared a simple questionnaire, splitting the requirements into small logical units and asked plain and simple queries on the topic to fully understand their business scenarios. The users easily understood the questions and were able to confirm the actual requirement sooner.

During the set-up, our consultants didn’t restrict themselves to just parameterization, but also added a lot of additional value by explaining to the users the pros and cons of current parameterization is made generic so that it can be enhanced later for future business offerings.