JEDDAH, 28 November 2004 — A new core banking system for Bahrain’s Shamil Bank is set to provide even more competitive advantages to the premier Islamic financial institution by enabling it to offer its customers an expanded range of innovative Shariah-compliant products and services. In addition, the solution will enable it to enhance its service levels and improve the efficiency of its internal operations. The solution is the first of its kind in Bahrain. It is based on IBM infrastructure, which will run the core banking solution.
Overall, the solution components include new IBM Power 5 servers, high-end Intel servers, an IBM eServer xSeries server, a storage server, and FastT600 and Cisco networking components for the bank’s entire data center.
The implementation will enable Shamil Bank to centralize its data management and processing requirements. This will integrate customer activities with back-end systems to create a much more efficient banking platform, which will align core systems with business goals. More efficient processes and a “customer-centric” approach to product and service development will provide the bank with a single view of each of its customers, regardless of the products, services or interaction channels they use. By linking business lines to a single application, customer needs can be analyzed. This serves as a catalyst for creating and modifying the bank’s product offerings. “Shamil Bank was the first to offer two-way SMS banking and was the first Islamic bank in Bahrain to offer Internet banking facilities,” said Dr. Said S. Al-Martan, the bank’s CEO. “The new core banking solution will enable us to continue to offer state-of-the-art Islamic products and services amid an environment of unfaltering customer service levels, which is a key competitive differentiator for us.” “The solution is an integral part of our continued evolution and is set to help take our customer service provision abilities to new heights,” said Yousif A. Al-Khan, senior manager of the bank’s IT unit. “Customer service will be enhanced as a result of flexibility, scalability, integration, operational simplicity and high availability, while internal productivity will be improved and the ability will exist to develop more innovative delivery channels and offer new and innovative banking products.”