Headquartered in Lebanon, Bankmed sal, offers commercial and private banking services to its clients. Bank has 47 local branches, 101 local ATMs, 5 overseas branches, and 4 banking subsidiaries. Bankmed wanted a core banking transformation and approached Oracle, who implemented FLEXCUBE Universal Banking Solution.

Implementation Process

Core banking transformation program included the implementation, and the scope spanned across more than 50 business modules, 5-6 distinct solutions from Oracle, complex interfaces of more than 200, and 40+ satellite systems. Bankmed core banking transformation was not just core banking transformation but also included edge systems such as internet and mobile banking, wealth management, and customer relationship management. The transformation journey began six years ago with evaluation, building the footprint of the overall solution that led to the commencement of the program. Since it was a long and complex program, there had been a consideration for changing to new internet and mobile banking solutions. Hence, a mid-flight upgrade was taken-up to revamp the solution footprint with the latest available solutions completely.

Bankmed program was launched with multiple products from Oracle, including a third-party treasury solution were implemented. An extensive set of customizations was undertaken to meet business needs and prepare Bankmed for the future. Building process workflows for current and future use for several business areas like loans, trade finance, customer onboarding, building central bank reporting data integrations, and a large no of ODI interfaces are a few examples of the complexity of the program. Flexcube was also designed to act as a central processing engine for all limits across the bank. A large core team of more than 50 people was involved, and more than 250 users tested the system along with a third-party testing team. A third-party vendor tested the entire system for performance to double the peak load ever expected on the systems, successfully. Bankmed went live on 3^rd August 2020, with minimal hassles on operations, and within a week the operations were fully functional.

The project team of Bankmed consisted of representatives from almost all the departments and business lines of Bankmed with a peak size of 250 resources during testing cycles. The project team include bank employees from retail, corporate, operations, treasury, financial control, branch network, risk management, trade finance, cards, and online banking. Nearly 80 business users were part of the core team who supported the project. IT team include people from IT program management, application support, and infrastructure management. The whole program from Bankmed’s side was governed by IT PMO, with the help of various application leads and infrastructure team. Nearly the 60-member team was fully involved in the project.

From Oracle’s side, the project team consisted of representatives from all product streams that were being implemented along with the Oracle Program manager and Program Management Office (PMO). The team was spread between onsite and offsite during various stages of the project. There were 15 Functional Leads/SMEs and 30 technical resources across various product streams. The Program Manager, along with 2 member teams, were managing the project all the time. There were around 10 members from other vendor teams to support the project.

The project management team implemented best practices that were needed to execute such a complex implementation. Some of these are highlighted below:

• Solution architecture: With a large number of systems and vendors participating, a complete solution map was prepared to assess on an ongoing basis the impact of any changes in set up or processes
• Requirements gathering and customization: Agility was followed in collecting requirements and validating the real need through the change control board. A development process was followed using shorter sets of requirements and making them available for testing in incremental steps
• Test scenarios: Base products were tested well before customizations were delivered. Dedicated test scenarios were created to test all bespoke development items. A walkthrough of impact on central bank reporting was done periodically to assess the effect
• Use of advanced systems to track incidents, ageing, solutions to incidents: incident classification, severity, tracking of defects into multiple rounds of testing were implemented
• End-user training programs were conducted at multiple stages to ensure a complete understanding of the system by bank staff and what is different in the new ecosystem

After the outburst of COVID-19 pandemic, the practices were enriched with special tasks such as WAR rooms, 24*7 support windows for each business area, and a daily review during the pre-go-live period. Moreover, the performance targets on the systems were raised beyond the initial targets given the impact the pandemic would have on digital transactions. Data transformation rules and processes were well established with key timelines and quality criteria.

Program Governance was one of the key drivers for the successful implementation of this banking transformation exercise. Project kickoff activity, many key governance schemes were undertaken few of which have been highlighted below.

• Program governance to track progress and milestones, every week
• Change control board to discuss customization items, integration items, de-scoping older legacy satellite systems, every fortnight
• Steering committee meetings every month, involving all stakeholders to note key progress and actions needed
• Key management meetings every month to remove hurdles for a future period of 10 weeks
• Regular PMO reviews with multiple business teams of the bank
• Multiple groups created to discuss business challenges, both old and new, and seek solutions
• Weekly status meetings between the PMs

While the above highlighted were standard governance processes, a few more were added during the geopolitical disturbances and later pandemic related challenges. Initially onsite travelling was nearly impossible and completely stopped during the pandemic. Below mentioned are a few of the other processes introduced.

• Built additional rounds of quality testing by key business teams
• Added more rounds of data transformation and data reconciliation to achieve financial reconciliation in less than 4-5 hours
• Performance testing was done at each system level and across completely integrated systems. Additional rounds were performed to go beyond the peak performance throughput
• Focus on performance and stability of the digital channel, knowing that pandemic would force more digital transactions than conventional branch-based transactions
• Launch of final testing with most likely business transactions that would typically create teething issues. This step helped sort out most issues faced during the first week of live operations
• Backup connectivity lines between Oracle and the bank were organized to support a situation when the regular internet fails
• Call centres were educated to handle incoming query traffics and clearly distinguish queries from issues reported for quickest possible action

Benefits Achieved

Some of the benefits leveraged from the new core banking platform are highlighted below.

• Core banking system became flexible enough to be parameterized for new product launches with a change in business needs
• Time to market new products from the bankside was substantially reduced
• Bank does not need to maintain various banking products (as in legacy) as per the business area. A single core banking product can meet the bank’s current and future needs
• FCUBS can be further customized and supported by a single core banking vendor for all the 5 products (FCUBS, OBDX, FCPB, Siebel CRM, Fusion MW) that have been implemented
• Core banking product also enabled the internal IT team to extend the existing functionality by carrying out enhancements in the customer layer in a short period
• End of business day processing compressed to less than 3 hours in comparison to the legacy system taking more than 8-10 hours and running across several systems

Conclusion

Oracle and Bankmed Lebanon completed a complex Core Banking Transformation Program on-time despite all challenges, demonstrating implementation of excellence and product architecture strength.

Some of the key highlights of the project are highlighted below:

• The program was large and complex, where the maximum number of FLEXCUBE modules were implemented at a time. Concurrently, it was also one of the rare programs where 5 Oracle products (FCUBS- Core system and additional business modules, OBDX- Digital banking platform, FCPB- Wealth Banking platform, Siebel CRM, Fusion Middleware) together were implemented at a single site and in one go
• The Phase 2 cutover of Bankmed was 100% done remotely from 5 different locations in different time zones with precision and excellent coordination within Oracle and Bankmed teams cutting across multiple vendors. Final rounds of testing of the system took place with most of the bank staff working from home connecting over secure lines
• Data migration was very complex as source data was provided from 10 different legacy systems and many of them in flat files which had to be uploaded in staging tables for pre-upload validation and transformation]

Key Facts

Bank: Bankmed
Headquarters: Lebanon
Supplier: Oracle Financial Services
Solution: FLEXCUBE Universal Banking Solution
Timeline: 25 months (July 2018 to July 2020)