Direction Générale du Trésor et de la Comptabilité Publique Ensures Retail Banking Services in Aftermath of Civil War—a Significant Contribution to Social Justice
 
 

Direction Générale du Trésor et de la Comptabilité Publique Ensures Retail Banking Services in Aftermath of Civil War—a Significant Contribution to Social Justice

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Direction Générale du Trésor et de la Comptabilité Publique (DGTCP), the National Treasury Department of the Republic of Ivory Coast, was established in 1963 to ensure public revenue collections and public expense payments. Today, DGTCP’s remittance responsibilities also cover district, public organizations, national treasury, and national debt financial management; financial market and insurance company surveillance; and financial management of foreign investments in Ivory Coast.

With a civil war lasting since 2002, Ivory Coast was in danger of its retail and commercial banks (mostly French bank branches) closing their counters in 2006, to guarantee employee safety. This made it very difficult for DGTCP to ensure salary payments to civil servants and government officials. To mitigate this risk, DGTCP created, that same year, a retail banking division, which required it to deploy a complete retail banking solution, with high availability, to deliver a complete range of retail banking services and ensure public-employee paychecks.

Working with Oracle partner EU Technology, DGTCP migrated national treasury and retail banking data and applications to two of Oracle’s SPARC Enterprise M4000 servers running Oracle Solaris on premise, greatly improving system performance and reducing processing time for these applications by, on average, more than half. By deploying a third SPARC Enterprise M4000 remotely at a disaster recovery site, the organization ensured that its core banking application was operational at all times. DGTCP also deployed Oracle’s SAN storage and StorageTek SL24 tape autoloaders to back up 400 gigabytes of retail banking and national treasury data per day and to store data at the lowest possible cost.

As a result, DGTCP ensured the continuity of national treasury services—such as financial management of districts and public organizations and for surveillance of financial markets and insurance companies. It also increased the reliability and quality of retail banking services across the country, for example by reducing waiting time for clients at bank counters. By deploying a third SPARC Enterprise M4000 with Oracle Solaris, installed remotely at a disaster recovery site, DGTCP ensured that its core banking application is available 24/7—a critical issue for providing basic banking services to the country’s population.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Direction Générale du Trésor et de la Comptabilité Publique

  • “DGTCP was the only organization that could step in when foreign banks left the country in 2006. Since that point, we have relied on Oracle, which provides the necessary platforms to ensure the continuity of public services and retail banking services nationwide. Without this framework, powered by Oracle hardware and software, Ivory Coast would not have recovered from its civil war as it did.” – François Kabran, IT Manager, Direction Générale du Trésor et de la Comptabilité Publique

  • Enable Direction Générale du Trésor et de la Comptabilité Publique (DGTCP) to offer growing retail banking services, such as mortgages, to Ivory Coast’s population with a highly available core banking application when commercial banks left the war-torn country
  • Add external storage arrays and tape loaders to help cope with restricted public budgets by keeping data storage costs at the lowest possible level
  • Add a third remote server to mitigate risks and ensure rapid data recovery in case of emergencies and disasters, such as power cuts or vandalism
  • Secure operational data from both retail banking and national treasury at all times and establish simple yet efficient backup procedures to fulfill the bank’s reporting and regulatory obligations to government and citizens

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Migrated the organization’s national treasury and retail banking data and applications pertaining to two SPARC Enterprise M4000 servers running Oracle Solaris to operate on the production site, greatly improving system performance and reducing a daily backup processing time that took six to eight hours, to just two to three hours
  • Deployed Oracle SAN Storage and StorageTek SL24 tape autoloaders to back up 400 gigabytes of retail banking and national treasury data per day, and to store data at the lowest possible cost
  • Ensured the continuity of national treasury services—such as financial management of districts and public organizations or surveillance of financial markets and insurance companies—and general public services across all departments by enabling DGTCP to pay civil servants and government officials monthly through its retail banking division
  • Ensured that the core banking application is available 24/7—a critical issue for providing basic banking services to the country’s population—by deploying a third SPARC Enterprise M4000 with Oracle Solaris installed remotely at a disaster recovery site, with all three servers constantly replicating each others’ data
  • Leveraged higher system performance to increase the reliability and quality of retail banking services, for example by reducing waiting time for clients at bank counters across the country
  • Optimized failover management with Oracle Solaris Cluster and reduced strain on SPARC Enterprise M4000 servers through better workload distribution, enabling IT managers to save time through automation
  • Enabled DGTCP’s 200 core banking application users—from cashiers, to the board of directors—to use a wide range of application functionalities based on Oracle Forms 11g and Oracle Hyperion SQR Production Reporting, such as instantly generating a pie chart of a client’s banking portfolio
  • Used the seamless integration of Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition 11g with the core banking application to maintain a single source of truth for the bank’s data, ensure data security, and facilitate full operations traceability—from private banking, to national treasury
  • Established simple, yet efficient backup procedures to fulfill the bank’s reporting and regulatory obligations toward the Republic of Ivory Coast and its citizens
  • Enabled DGTCP to schedule opening new branches for its retail banking division across the country without slowing down system performance by relying on proven Oracle hardware and software that is rapidly scalable at low cost as a backbone for its growing IT infrastructure

Why Oracle

“We are extremely satisfied with the performance of Oracle’s platforms which we have run since 2006, and with the services delivered by Oracle and Oracle partner EU Technology. We therefore saw no reason to consider another vendor than Oracle,” said François Kabran, IT manager, Direction Générale du Trésor et de la Comptabilité Publique.

Partner

EU Technology S.A.—an Oracle partner—implemented the Oracle solutions from end to end, working with close cooperation with Oracle partner Capital Banking Solution, which was in charge of implementing the core banking application.

"We are impressed by the high level of performance and reliability of the SPARC Enterprise M4000 servers, running Oracle Solaris, that we have implemented at DGTCP, where the Oracle solution supports a very critical banking environment that requires a high level of efficiency and availability. DGTCP's core banking solution Capital Global Banking performs extremely well on SPARC Enterprise M4000 servers." – Frédéric Rouvier, Chief Executive Officer, EU Technology S.A. 

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