Oracle Customer Success—Boubyan Bank

Boubyan Bank Boosts System Performance and Eliminates Downtime for Rapidly Growing Shari'ah-Compliant Bank

As the fastest growing bank in Kuwait, we were regularly hitting limits in our IT systems. We’ve increased our staff from 218 in 2005 to more than 1,000 today, so we also needed greatly enhanced system capacity. Oracle helped address those challenges, while enabling internal finance teams to work faster and providing us with a very versatile reporting mechanism.

— Mohammed Jomah Al-Shami, IT Project Manager, Boubyan Bank

Boubyan Bank, a Kuwait Islamic bank established in 2004, has paid up capital exceeding approximately US$700 million (196.5 million KWD).

Boubyan Bank is one of the emerging banks in Kuwait and Gulf Cooperation Council. It benefits from its relationship with National Bank of Kuwait, the major shareholder, which is ranked among the largest 300 banks worldwide. Boubyan Bank provides a variety of banking services to individuals and corporate customers. Its main activities include accepting deposits, providing financing, establishing investment funds, and trading in real estate.

Boubyan Bank has received many international awards and recognitions in appreciation of its success and contribution to Islamic finance. These awards were granted by reputable organizations, such as Global Finance, Euromoney; the Service Hero consumer-driven customer satisfaction index; and Arabian Business.

Business Challenge

Increase user productivity by eliminating downtime and ensuring the IT systems keep pace with the rapid expansion in banking staff
Reduce IT maintenance costs despite business growth

Maintain customizations to payment systems and other processes that are core to Islamic banking operations, while standardizing noncore functionalities to streamline performance
Allow various departments to generate reports in different formats—such as spreadsheets, text files, and HTML files—to enhance reporting versatility and gain faster insight into financial key performance indicators

Supported Islamic financial market growth, resulting in a 20% increase in branch numbers and a tripling of staff since 2005, by deploying Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.3 on a robust and highly scalable architecture
Increased server performance by more than 30%, reduced system crashes by more than 40%, and cut memory loss by more than 25% by implementing Oracle Linux 5.8, which enhanced banking employees’ productivity significantly

Streamlined accounting processes in multiple currencies and optimized financial reconciliation of subledgers to the general ledger controls, thanks to new features such as Oracle Subledger Accounting
Ensured 24-hour operations and support to meet rising banking demands—which have seen a compounded annual growth rate of 23% for the previous four years—by eliminating downtime caused by the legacy operating system
Employed Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher to enhance reporting versatility—providing each user with the reporting format based on individual preference, for an example, spreadsheets for finance-focused users—resulting in faster, more accurate analyses; deeper insight; and more informed decision-making
Reduced burden on accounting staff by automating numerous accounting processes with Oracle Financials’ subledger accounting engine, which helped accountants to focus more on strategic issues
Migrated customized forms, reports, payment processes, purchasing modules, alerts, and other systems to Oracle E-Business Suite to pave the way for outstanding efficiency, thanks to homogeneous and uninterrupted work flows

We chose Oracle E-Business Suite release 12.1.3 because we felt it was the best platform to help us maintain our rapid growth rate, which is currently the fastest in the Kuwaiti banking system. We also had experience with Oracle’s reliability as a technology vendor, so we did not need to debate the selection much, since making the decision to choose Oracle was obvious for us.

— Mohammed Jomah Al-Shami, IT Project Manager, Boubyan Bank

Execution

Teams from Evosys and Boubyan Bank successfully completed the implementation over a week-long, scheduled Muslim holiday, avoiding downtime, meeting budget targets, and facilitating a seamless transition once employees reported back to work. The implementation included migrating the bank’s IT platform from Microsoft Windows 2003 32-bit to Oracle Linux 5.8 64-bit version, as well as an application migration and a database migration. It also required recreating 30, highly customized HTML forms from scratch.

About Boubyan Bank

Headquarters

Kuwait City, Kuwait

Annual Revenue

$100 to $500 Million

Boubyan Bank

Partners

Boubyan Bank engaged Oracle Platinum Partner Evosys Kuwait WLL for the upgrade, based on Evosys’ extensive experience with the Middle East customer base, its tested and proven upgrade methodology, and its track record for meeting deadlines and budgets.

“Evosys is one of the best vendors I have ever had the pleasure to work with. Its highly committed workforce is driven by commitment and enthusiasm. Evosys aim was always to maximize the output, improve the performance, and enhance the value of our Oracle solution. It dealt with all tasks very promptly and put in great efforts to ensure that the project was completed successfully. I highly recommend Evosys for Oracle projects,” Al-Shami said.

“At Boubyan Bank, the server performance increase realized with Oracle Linux 5.8 was staggering. With its unique features, such as kernel patching without rebooting and real-time diagnostics, Oracle Linux is the best foundation to run a banking platform with zero downtime,” said Vikas Surani, project manager, Evosys Kuwait WLL.