Bankin, Absa Bank`s asset-based finance division, is developing a software platform that will speed up the delivery of new financial products to the market.
A building block or component based approach to technology, pioneered in South Africa by Rubico, will provide the strategic platform and flexibility from which Bankfin can evolve with market trends and fits in well with the Absa strategic decision to implement Websphere from IBM.
"We need to be able to move quickly as a business, but find that the current older technologies supporting our back-office systems are constraining our more modern front-end systems," says Marie Vermaak, Bankfin`s General Manager: Business Sector IT.
"Because of the long IT development life cycle needed to support different business initiatives, it sometimes takes longer than we would like to bring new financial products to market."
Rubico was chosen out of 15 companies invited by Bankfin to meet its specifications. These were for: "a component-based, tightly integrated front-end and back-office environment, flexible enough on the technology side to cater for any changes to its business rules to allow the company to put together new products as and when a market need arises".
"It was a tall order," says Vermaak. "Just seven companies responded to our request and only four finally made the short list.
"Rubico was chosen because it can bring more than 1000 ready-built components to the solution. Also, the speed with which they can deliver solutions, as demonstrated by the robust prototype particularly impressed us, as did their methodology."
Bankfin will be stealing a march on the rest of South Africa`s financial sector in becoming one of the first to implement component-based solutions. These were dismissed as `bleeding edge` in the mid 1990s when Rubico was established. Today, the Gartner Group believes that by 2003, at least 70% of new applications will be built primarily from components.
Bankfin`s two-year development, now underway, has been split into five projects which will be developed in parallel and implemented incrementally with the first deliverable already due by September.
Says Jay van Zyl, Rubico`s Technology and Research Director: "We did not push Bankfin into a functionality supply corner, but allowed them to assemble the required processes into unique business systems. This will allow them to reduce their administration costs, bring products to market faster and reduce their cycle times."
Vermaak agrees: "If we had opted to implement a traditional IT environment, the whole project would have taken at least four years and would have been much more expensive - that is what components mean in bottom-line terms. "With Rubico it`s a totally new paradigm. The insurance development, for example is a seven-month project. Four months of this is planning and determining the needs of the business users and the production of a document detailing where we are and where we want to be. Three months later, we`re going live."
Vermaak says that by involving business in the whole development process, everyone gets close to the technology and it brings discipline to the project.
"I`ve worked on several large projects in the past, but I`ve never seen people at all levels - administrative, branch and divisional get so enthusiastic and knowledgeable about technology. They walk around talking about concepts such as UMLs (Unified Modelling Language), which is a standard way of documenting the business environment before a new system can be built. Rubico has trained them very well, " she says.
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