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Leading North African Bank Implements Calypso to drive their business into the future of banking

The Company

This leading Bank in North Africa provides retail, and corporate and investment banking services.

Background

Aware of the emerging trends in international banking and its desire to promote its activities in every field, the Bank needed a Treasury Management Solution to meet their operational and regulatory needs, and also keep up with their medium and long-term strategy in providing capital market products to their clients. Several in-house built legacy systems were being relied upon to achieve front-to-back functionality.

Adenza’s Calypso system was determined to be the best solution for front-to-back capabilities and STP functionality.

The Calypso system allowed all business units in the Bank a single source of truth, ensuring a front-to-back solution enabling quicker decision-making and efficient operational processes. As part of this functionality, Calypso provides the Bank with an integrated platform to support front, middle, back office, risk and Treasury, across cash and derivatives products. Calypso replaced a variety of systems they had in place with a single comprehensive solution.

Why Andile

Andile has been a trusted partner and advisor to Calypso (now Adenza) for many years, demonstrating its ability to manage major vendor implementation projects for Investment Banks globally. Having worked in countries including South Africa, Mauritius, Zambia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, Andile proved well equipped to implement the Calypso system for the Bank.

Additionally, Andile has extensive experience completing projects in time and on budget, which was vital to the Bank.

Problem

Asset Classes:

FX Products, Money Market & Discount Papers, Islamic Finance, Interest Rate Derivatives, Fixed Income, Securities Finance, Equities, Unitised Funds.

Modules:

Front Office, Back Office, Accounting, Market Risk, Credit Risk Limits, Asset and Liability Management.

Problem

Andile identified four areas within the Bank that needed focus:

1. Operations

The Bank’s operations were limited as a result of their legacy systems. The Bank’s systems could no longer support its activities and were incapable of meeting its strategic needs for expanding into new territories and offering new products. The systems were also limited in their ability to integrate with each other, making it difficult for the Bank to conduct its Treasury operations.

2. System Shortcomings

A number of issues were identified with the Bank’s legacy systems, including inadequate system support. In particular, the systems had limited integration capabilities, which made it difficult for Treasury operations to be conducted efficiently. Their systems didn’t offer straight-through processing capabilities or cater to many of the products the Bank offered.

Solution

Following a thorough evaluation and review, the Bank chose to implement Calypso as a Treasury Management Solution to meet their operational and system requirements.

Andile was contracted by Calypso as their preferred African partner to implement the solution. This project was Andile’s first Islamic Banking Calypso implementation.

Calypso provided the Bank with a full STP front-to-back, including ALM Solution, which would provide them with the necessary operational STP efficiencies as well as asset classes to meet the international expansion strategy without diminishing the client experience. Andile offered a proven project execution methodology, assisting the Bank from scoping through to implementation and post go-live support with the necessary training.

Results

To adhere to international best practices and meet the Bank’s objectives, Andile guided the Bank in successfully implementing a world-class Treasury Management Solution. Throughout the project lifecycle, Andile’s subject matter experts provided guidance from scoping, through to business process mapping, data migration, testing, training and end-to-end project management to ensure the Bank’s requirements were met.

Key Success Metrics

  • Successful Islamic banking implementation
  • Implementation of a treasury target operating model (TOM)
  • On time, on budget
  • Consolidation of multiple systems and operating processes
  • Reduction in operational risks
  • Delivered during the pandemic on a hybrid on-shore and off-shore model
  • Full front-to-back implementation of Calypso within 12 month period