Temenos signs Al Hilal to T24 Islamic Model Bank
Temenos Group (SWX: TEMN), the provider of integrated core banking systems, today announced that Al Hilal Bank, a greenfield Islamic bank set up by the Abu Dhabi government, has selected Temenos T24 (T24) to support its retail, commercial and investment banking business.
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Al Hilal Bank will initially operate its branches network across the United Arab Emirates, supporting up to 100,000 customer accounts.
The bank has chosen the T24 Islamic Model Bank, which includes pre-configured products and processes based on banking best practice to reduce implementation time and costs, minimise customisation and lower the project risk. The solution will also include TEMENOS ARC Internet Banking (ARC IB), which will allow the Bank to maximise the return on its investment in the core platform by minimising staffing skill requirements and in-house T24 knowledge. It also minimises the cost of integration, thereby reducing the total cost of ownership of the internet channel.
Mohamed Berro, CEO of Al Hilal Bank, says: "For us, speed of implementation was extremely important. We were looking for a core banking system that was Sharia compliant, highly flexible and scalable and would allow us to easily roll out new and innovative channels and products to our market. We wanted a proven, best-practice low risk approach that will take us live in time for our launch in June 2008. After a two month selection period, T24 emerged as the system that could meet all of these requirements."
Al Hilal considered a number of vendors before signing the deal with Temenos in February 2008. A Temenos professional services team is set to roll out the Model Bank in just five months. T24 will be deployed over IBM servers with an Oracle Database and Cisco call centre solution. Prasad Abraham, COO of Al Hilal Bank, adds: "We have great plans for our bank and T24 is central to them. We expect our partnership with Temenos will support our aggressive growth strategy locally and internationally."
Andreas Andreades, CEO of Temenos, adds: "Al Hilal Bank is a significant win for Temenos as it confirms that we are fast in our implementations, and also becoming the vendor of choice for Islamic banks around the world. The bank's selection of our Model Bank is further proof that we can provide Islamic banking functionality out of the box and without modification across a number of different countries and in record time."