GBST wins two IBS Intelligence NeoChallenger Bank Awards

By Leandra Monteiro

GBST has been selected as the 2022 winners for the IBSI NeoChallenger Bank Awards in two categories, “Islamic Finance” and “Regional Winner – Australia”, for its online calculators and CMS solution developed for Hejaz Financial Services.

The highly configurable suite of nine calculator’s cover Sharia-compliant insurance needs, extra repayments, offset, borrowing power, retirement adequacy, stamp duty, insurance adequacy, and rent vs buy, along with a content management solution (CMS) to make changes to the calculators easily and quickly. The calculators were designed with ‘mobile first’ in mind and are responsive across all devices. Graphs and visual illustrations are utilised, so users are served visual cues to illustrate financial results. They can integrate with any open APIs or product feeds and are easily extended to compare other financial products such as loan or superannuation fund products.

Robert DeDominicis, CEO at GBST, commented, “We are proud to have been recognised for the second year in a row, and are delighted with our win in two categories. With over 100 participating enterprises, we are honoured that our award submission stood out.”

Brianna Dobing, GBST’s Head of Digital, said, “The GBST Digital Team are delighted with our award wins, and it’s a reminder of how much the GBST team enjoyed working on the Hejaz project. Hejaz was our first Islamic finance client, and to be recognised as the winner in the “Islamic Finance” category gives us immense pride.

“Hejaz approached us to provide website tools to educate its customers on their financial situation. In an implementation that was completed in under two months, GBST helped Hejaz to deliver its vision of providing easy-to-use online tools and calculators to complement its Sharia-compliant financial products and services for the Islamic community.”

As an Islamic-focused financial group, Hejaz uses slightly different terms – for example, instead of interest rate, it uses Ijarah rate – and it was a fundamental requirement that the Hejaz team be able to configure these changes as and when needed. With the CMS solution GBST delivered alongside the calculators, Hejaz can easily edit field labels, rates, and text in the calculators, without incurring any extra costs.