KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 19 — CIMB Group today announced that it has successfully installed a new core banking system in Malaysia to upgrade capacity and service levels as well as homogenise its operating systems across the region.
The massive installation exercise involving migration of data of over eight million customers was undertaken over the recent Chinese New Year holidays and at its peak, involved about 12,000 staff.
“There is never a good time to perform a system migration. We chose to do this over the Chinese New Year holidays as statistics show that this period yields the lowest transaction volumes, and as such, would inconvenience the least number of customers. We thank all our customers for their patience and indulgence, as our ATMs and CIMB Clicks were unavailable for two days,” said CIMB Group chief executive, Dato’ Sri Nazir Razak.
Just over three years ago, CIMB Group announced its ambitious plan to implement an RM1.1 billion new core banking system project for its banks in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand after almost a year-long process of system selection and project design. The project, dubbed “1Platform”, was aimed at installing a single regional IT and operations framework for all CIMB entities.
With CIMB Malaysia and Thailand operating on legacy systems nearing capacity ceilings, the Group decided to undertake a region-wide new system project to enjoy economies of scale of procurement, but more importantly to realise cost and other operating efficiencies of having a single system and similar operating processes across all countries.
CIMB Malaysia is the third CIMB entity to have successfully implemented 1Platform; roll-outs in Singapore and Thailand were completed in 2011 and 2012 respectively. Indonesia has embarked on its implementation phase and is targeting to complete by end 2015.
“Although we had the benefit of successful implementations in two countries, Malaysia was always going to be the biggest and most complicated leg of the whole project,” added Nazir.
“History of systems migration exercises in the banking industry, and in general, is fraught with more failures than successes and it is a huge tribute to our core implementation team and the support and discipline of thousands of others who were involved that we have now been successful in three countries. We are also pleased that our Malaysia implementation has been completed according to timeline and will cost less than its original RM630 million budget.”
With 1Platform, customers can look forward to improvements in service from CIMB. The new operating system consolidates multiple legacy systems into one which will require much less “down-times” and operates at quicker speeds. The new system has also been designed with the customer at the forefront and thus facilitates more effective customisation and bundling of products.
Once the entire regional 1Platform is complete, customers will have region-wide recognition. Malaysian customers have been provided new account numbers; even though original numbers remain valid, the new number will be needed for cross border recognition in the future.
“If we go by our Singapore and Thailand experience, the benefits of 1Platform comes gradually but surely, both for customers and in terms of internal productivity indicators,” concluded Nazir. — Bernama
