Central Bank goes digital to enhance services

National Bank of Rwanda has launched a modern data centre, a project aimed at improving services and effectively monitoring the bank’s business and meeting internal standards.The infrastructure also sits well with the country’s target of becoming a financial hub.Acentre is complete and operational, equipped with the most recent technology.The data centre connects Central Bank with its branches across the country and all banks and other financial institutions thus making it easy to deal with volatilities in the sector.“Through the data centre, computers will be fixed without me living my desk and problems in the system will be detected and solved prior to causing big risks,” said Amb. Claver Gatete while addressing journalists on Friday last week.The electronic instrument will display different trading in the banking sector able to detect abnormality in transactions.“Ultimately, this will help to improve services provided to the BNR customers with regards to international standards and facilitate the bank to implement its mandate,” read a statement from BNR.Similarly, BNR also launched the core banking system to create greater efficiency of the bank processes. The only other central bank with such a system is the Central Bank of Kenya.Temenos East Africa will jointly implement the project alongside Mahindra Satyam and Computer Point.Saddiq Mwai Njuguna, the Project Director, Temenos East Africa, said tangible benefits include, an overall improvement in operational effectiveness that will allow for delivery of efficient internal and external services, with improvements in speed, flexibility, and integration between the different operational sectors.“All will culminate in greater efficiency through automation and elimination of duplicating and overlapping functions and processes,” said Njuguna in an interview.The system will allow the central bank to reduce its total cost of operations through streamlining of systems and processes.This week, 11 senior managers and six technicians in the bank will be trained on how to pave way for a new chapter in the transformation of the entire spectrum of the National Bank of Rwanda’s Human Resources, Administration, Banking, Financial, and Payment and Monetary systems.“We also foresee greater transactional security and control, improved data quality, insight and accessibility,” he said.The challenge mentioned while implementing such a system was change management. He suggested that to successfully manage, coordinate, and complete a large complex core banking and ERP transformation programme, BNR requires a holistic and disciplined approach.“Over the years, we have recognised that it is vital to apply strong, focused and skillful project and change management teams,” he said, adding that implementing partners pledged support to the entire process.In a bid to modernise its payment system, central bank intends to introduce a cheques truncation system to reduce time, trim costs and manpower during physical movements of cheques. The system is expected to eliminate payment lag and related frauds due to enhanced security features in the cheques.Central bank says by adopting ICT in all their operations, it is well aligned in the national policy of vision 2020 that projects the National bank of Rwanda to be the best central bank in the region.

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Central Bank goes digital to enhance services