Dissatisfied with their manual treasury bill auction process - a debt instrument used by the Malawi Government to borrow funds from the private sector - that required reams of paperwork and time-consuming duplication of data, Reserve Bank of Malawi required a way to automate its processes the paperless way. Staffware provided a solution that not only freed up its staff form the strenuous manual work but also reduced the time taken to settle the transactions, thus improving cashflow.
The Reserve Bank, as an agent of the Malawi Government, issues Treasury Bills to individuals and organisations. Traditionally, offers are sent via a fax to the Reserve Bank and is known as the Treasury Bill Auction bidding process.
Says Albert Myburgh, Project Manager at Malswitch, a project within the Reserve Bank of Malawi providing a financial switching environment: "Reserve Bank of Malawi required an automated workflow process to automate the processes involved with bill bidding. A participant/bidder (a member of the general public or company offering loan funds to the Malawi Government) would customarily submit a bid via fax, which is received and processed by the Reserve Bank of Malawi. The objective of a workflow system includes relieving the staff of the workload involved with the traditional method of manual capture of the bids and duplication of this information onto the financial and back-end systems."
A direct result of the automation is the reduced time taken to settle the transaction, from approximately six day to two days, thus making funds more readily available. With additional development this may be further reduced to a same day settlement.
Prior to implementing a workflow solution, once a bid was received, the form was captured into an Excel spreadsheet and again onto an MS Access database. Thereafter it was manually keyed into the financial system and certificates were manually produced for the successful applicants.
Says Mark Ehmke, managing director of Staffware SA: "The Staffware 2000 workflow system enabled this process to be automated, thus reducing the time taken to receive, validate, accept and issue certificates.
"Automating the processes reduced settlement time, freed up staff to focus on other productive duties and eliminated errors by utilising data that was input by the customer directly into the bank`s systems."
This was achieved through the installation of Staffware`s workflow system on two nodes linked to the Reserve Bank of Malawi`s IT infrastructure, allowing regular participants to submit their bids online.
With the workflow system in place, the application or bid is validated and a confirmation is sent back to the participant. This process eliminates the human factor whereby a fax could be misplaced or misread.
Queued until 11am on the auction date, the bid is automatically released and updated on the database, eliminating rewriting and recapturing of this information. Subsequently, the system releases a list for each tenure (the period of the loan can comprise 91, 182 or 273 days for Treasury Bills and 63 or 91 days for Reserve Bank of Malawi Bills).
Once a bid is accepted, output is produced for the back office functions from the workflow procedure, which in turn automates printing certificates for the successful applicants.
Myburgh continues: "Before choosing a workflow system, we considered issues such as ease of integration and flexibility to accommodate customised processes. This was critical to the Reserve Bank of Malawi as a clumsy, complicated system would have taken a lot longer to implement - something we could not afford.
Further development to the financial system may see the Reserve Bank of Malawi integrate the Real Time Gross Settlement System with the Book Entry System, which will automate the use of these securities as collateral for the financial institutions. This will be yet another enhancement resulting from integration of two systems by automating the processes between the systems. In this day and age where time is money, reducing staff workload means a return on investment that is rapidly achievable.
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