Indigenous software practitioners in Nigeria may soon have their much-awaited big deal.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is working out a scheme that would unify local developers to build a single banking platform for banks.

If it sails through, it would keep local developers busy and may end the dominance of the banking solution market by foreign vendors.

Largely ignored, local software practitioners have remained in the background. Increased consumption of banking packages by banks has meant little to the practitioners.

 The apex bank is working out the scheme with a number of banks. They would the crux of users for the envisaged solutions.

Most banks have implemented IT solutions to drive their operations in the Nigerian banking sector. Virtually all solutions implemented are from abroad with those from India such as Finacle and Globus in the lead.

The country’s oldest and biggest bank, First Bank of Nigeria (FBN) Plc., is driven by Finacle since FBN embarked on its re-engineering process, tagged ‘Century II’ over two years ago.

Now, there are over 130 branches of FBN hooked up to its Finacle application to enable its one-branch banking.

Other banks running high on IT are First Atlantic Bank, Guaranty Trust Bank and Oceanic Bank among several others.

“Most of these are Indian products, so the banks are looking at all these together and saying what is in this that our own people cannot do? They have seen that most of what we are using either by design or by default are coming from outside.

“And they are trying to say let us bring together a number of developers and give them an assignment to say do this for us,” said President of the Nigeria Computer Society (NCS) Dr Chris Nwannenna at an interactive session organised by IT Edge at the weekend.

Banks have invested several billions to implement banking solutions from abroad to keep abreast of competition. Besides, billions go into sustaining the yearly licensing fees.

“What the banks pay out every year in hard currency as licensing fees is tremendous. It is not as if they cannot get options here. They can get these people to give them something as good if not better and conserve their money to do other things,” one CBN official said.

The huge figure is making the country’s apex bank uncomfortable. At a one of its close sessions with some banks’ chiefs, the CBN led by its IT team counseled that automation need not be completely depended on foreign software.

“Banks have a responsibility to use investors’ money wisely while pursuing the best interest of their banks,” added the CBN official. The CBN which has had most of its operations driven by software is running on foreign solutions.

The new scheme would mean a deliberate reduction of its dependency on those offshore solutions. It wants the commercial banks to do the same.

Local packages have equally found there way into the banking hall, though they only end up supporting the dominant foreign solutions. More…..

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