Ziraat Bank London to replace legacy core banking tech with Misys Fusionbanking
Ziraat Bank goes local for tech projects
Turkey’s banking group, Ziraat, is to modernise core banking software at its London branch, Banking Technology understands.
On the way out is the legacy Bankware core system from a UK-based developer, International Financial Systems (iFinancial).
It is understood that Ziraat Bank will replace it with Misys’ FusionBanking. Misys provided a “no comment” response to Banking Technology.
Ziraat Bank London offers corporate and personal banking services.
Go local
Ziraat has a chequered history when it comes to technology projects.
It first attempted a large-scale revamp in the mid-2000s with Temenos and its T24 system. This, however, did not succeed.
Then, in 2011, TCS Financial Solutions secured the deal with Ziraat to roll out its core banking offering, Bancs, across the bank’s international network of 50+ locations. This venture was scrapped a few years later too.
It is believed that there were multiple issues on both sides in the second instance, including the lack of support for the project at Ziraat and the underestimation of costs by TCS.
There was a subsequent management change at the bank, which brought a new strategy of addressing the IT needs of international locations on a case by case basis with local/regional vendors, instead of an enterprise-wide roll-out.
In the Balkans (Bosnia, Kosovo and Montenegro), the operations are now underpinned by the PUB 2000 and bApO core systems from Asseco SEE.
In Germany, the project to modernise Ziraat’s technology went the way of Intertech. The German operation of Ziraat is relatively big: it is a standalone subsidiary (rather than a branch) – Ziraat Bank International AG – with HQ in Frankfurt and eight branches across the country.
The new solution replaced the legacy Paba/Q system from German developer Actis.BSP, which was acquired by Temenos back in 2007.
Intertech is a Turkey-based banking software vendor, which is part of Denizbank (owned by Russia’s Sberbank).
In Central Asia, Ziraat’s subsidiary banks in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan standardised their ops on Colvir Software Solutions’ CBS core platform.
