Nigerian IT solutions firm Inlaks Computers has said it has completed the automation of more than 700 Ghanaian rural and community banks (RCBs) on Temenos T24, a single management software platform for real time online transaction processing.
Inlaks had earlier bagged the contract for the computerisation and centralisation of the operations of all the 136 RCBs in Ghana.
Femi Adeoti, CEO of Inlaks, described the relief the project has brought to the RCB operations in Ghana. “The computerization has resolved all the pains associated with manual processes and has rendered the RCBs to be more competitive in the Ghanaian banking sector in terms of profitability and efficient service delivery,” he said.
He added that the automation rollout of RCBs operations in Ghana has “a resultant effect of sanitizing the nation’s microfinance industry” as it is also enabling the Ghanaian bank to effectively perform oversight functions over the RCBs.
“The uniqueness of the project is in its architecture which prevents customer of RCB ‘A’ from being a customer of RCB ‘B’ although all the 130 RCBs run on a single database and infrastructure which is hosted at a single data centre by ARB apex bank,” he said.
He then suggested that similar projects be carried out in the Nigerian microfinance banking sub-sector, which he said is currently plagued with paucity of necessary infrastructures. “This has eroded the confidence in the sub-sector, making it a source of concern to the regulatory authority,’ he said.
In its own capacity, the Nigerian apex bank is leaving no stone unturned in reviving the operations of the nation’s 898 microfinance institutions. Recently, it introduced some measures with the aim of making Nigerian microfinance banks more profitable.
US-based Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) sponsored the project, which was implemented by the Millennium Development Authority (MiDA), a government agency.
