JSE Securities Exchange-listed Global Technology has continued its strong push into Africa by concluding its first Globus contract in Uganda, the Tropical Africa Bank of Uganda, in a contract worth more than R1.8 million.
The fully integrated Globus system was developed by Swiss Stock Exchange-listed Temenos, in which Global Technology has a 15% stake.
"This is a very strategic win," says Global Technology chairman Ray Leonard. "It has significantly enhanced the awareness of Globus in this territory, and led to inquiries from other banks. Secondly, it is our first implementation of Globus on the JBase platform, a new technology that makes it database-independent. This paves the way for many more implementations of this nature. Most Globus implementations run on the uniVerse database, but it is our goal to be technology-independent, and JBase helps us towards this goal."
With branches in Kampala, Jinja and Masaka, Tropical Africa Bank is a retail operation offering savings, current and fixed time deposits; loans and overdrafts; letters of credit, guarantees, bonds, foreign exchange and funds transfer. It is aiming to enter new markets, and accordingly it is upgrading its systems by buying the full core application suite of Globus.
The bank currently runs an in-house banking system developed in Cobol. "Globus is far more powerful than this system," says Abdussalam Abushagur, deputy GM at the bank. "It will improve the efficiency with which we run the bank, and enable us to meet the financial sector`s growing business requirements, and to upgrade our quality of service through the application of modern technology, such as electronic and automated banking services.
"On the one hand, Globus will be our transaction processing platform; on the other, it will give us competitive advantage, allowing us to develop new products and cheap delivery systems, such as ATM and Swift. This will reduce our exposure to risk and increase profitability," adds Abushagur.
There will be 25 concurrent users on the system, distributed among the branches and head office. Globus will be installed on a Compaq server running Red Hat Linux.
Tropical Africa Bank Limited is to provide implementation services with support from Global Technology, and it expects to go live by year-end.
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