Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad, established in 1983 as Malaysia’s first financial institution to be Sharia compliant, has selected Temenos Group’s TEMENOS T24 to support its core banking operations in 90 branches across Malaysia, including its internet banking.
Bank Islam offers more than 50 Islamic banking products and services, which are expanded from the traditional savings and investment types. The bank has a strong presence in the domestic arena catering for the personal and commercial needs of Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
“We have a rapidly expanding customer base of both Muslim and non-Muslim customers and needed a core banking system that could provide breadth of functionality, flexibility and the ability to quickly roll out innovative products to our market. The main reason we wanted a product with internationally accepted best practices was to facilitate our strategy to penetrate the global markets. We turned to Temenos following good references from several leading banks and found T24 to be the most suitable solution for our requirements,” says Dato’ Zukri Samat, managing director, Bank Islam.
Bank Islam considered a number of vendors before signing the deal with Temenos in October 2007. T24 will replace two in-house systems, a Silverlake core banking platform and an i-Flex internet banking system, which the bank has operated over the last 10 years.
Bank Islam chose Temenos’ Model Bank implementation methodology, 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. A joint implementation team will roll out the T24 Model Bank, a pre-configured version of the T24 system that targets up to 80% functional fit out of the box, leveraging Temenos’ experience of over 600 implementations around the globe.
Bank Islam has selected Islamic and Universal banking products and processes to ensure that it complies with Sharia banking laws and principles. T24 will be deployed on IBM P-Series Unix servers and an Oracle database, and is expected to go live in Q4 2008.
“Bank Islam is a significant win for Temenos, we welcome it to our community of 20 other customers who offer Islamic Banking products, primarily across the Middle East and Asia Pacific regions. The bank’s selection of our Islamic and Universal Model Bank products is further proof that our ‘bank in a box’ solution provides Islamic banking functionality out of the box and without modification across a number of different countries,” adds Andreas Andreades, CEO, Temenos.