Albaraka Bank Limited in South Africa provides a system of banking that harmonises with Islamic economic principles and offers products and services to any individual or business. It promotes the understanding and adoption of Islamic business principles which contribute largely to the socio-economic development of the broader community. The bank’s impressive growth and success may be attributed to its ability to implement and sustain a viable alternative to interest-based banking which meets the needs of the people of Southern Africa irrespective of religion, race or gender.

As with many Banks, Albaraka’s core business applications reside on an IBM System i platform which runs the classic AS/400 green screen interface. Albaraka’s desire to constantly improve its products and services to its customers, optimize operational efficiencies and meet the demands of regulatory requirements were restricted by the proprietary nature of the current banking system and applications. Hence Albaraka’s ability to respond to a constantly evolving business environment was severely curtailed.

The aforementioned challenge combined with the need to enhance system functionalities meant that a suitable toolset had to be found which would enable the convergence of its existing application modules without limiting the ability to add form and functionality or contravening proprietary system licensing laws. In addition, the application interface was required to reflect the more contemporary web-based view as an illustrative feature of system modernization.

The first development to be addressed in line with this strategy was the Basel II compliance project. The Basel II project required the creation of additional user defined fields and the generation of a myriad of regulatory returns. Accordingly, the strategy adopted by Albaraka was to create supplementary databases stored outside the core banking system. However, in adopting this approach due cognisance had to be taken of the impact on users in respect of minimizing data capture on both the banking system and the supplementary databases. It was therefore essential that the users were presented with a single, efficient and user-friendly interface to facilitate one-time data capture,

The toolset had to be flexible enough to facilitate updating of both DB/2 and SQL databases. Due to the time constraints in respect of the project deadlines, the deployment of the application had to be with minimum delay.

Considering the strategic requirements of the Bank vis-à-vis the limitations of its banking system, the Information Technology Manager - Naushaad E Khan called for the evaluation of suitable technology that would fit the concept of systems integration and convergence.

In evaluating the potential solutions available to the bank, consideration was given to the fact that the development team members were primary skilled in VB, RPG and to a limited extent .Net. It was acknowledged, however, that any new toolset would require a learning process. Another consideration of importance was the need for a reliable and adequately skilled support base along with compliance to open standards such as Web Services and XML. Ideally Albaraka wanted the best of both worlds, a product which was relatively easy to use but not restricted in its ability to meet current or future requirements.

The familiar Visual Studio development environment allowed the Albaraka development team to start using the tool with the least amount of training. The automatic code generated using Flynet Viewer was compliant with open standards and the inbuilt browser based 5250 emulation was fast, reliable and required no plug-ins which is essential for low bandwidth usage.

The first stage of enhancing Albaraka’s banking systems to conform to the requirements of Basel II was realised in only 2.5 months using only one developer.

Sandham added; “The initial goal to satisfy the initial regulatory requirements has been achieved and due to the speed of development we were able to include additional unplanned functionality resulting in the improvement of the operational efficiency at the bank’s branches and head office operations...”

Albaraka’s IT Manager was pleased with the rapid progress of the development, the seamless integration of modular systems and the reliable support provided by Flynet’s professional team.