IBM Cloud to accelerate Cooperative Bank of Oromia’s Digital Transformation

IBM has announced that Cooperative Bank of Oromia has turned to IBM for transformation of its core banking, middleware and database infrastructure to help manage its operations and fuel current expansion. IBM solutions offer the agility for the bank to carry out its most critical IT operations.

Cooperative Bank of Oromia, CBO (S.C.) began operations in 2005 and now serves over 2.4 million customers, with a total of 283 branches and sub-branches in Ethiopia. The bank needed a core banking system that would provide a competitive edge as it enhanced services to expand in the growing market. They tapped IBM solutions to efficiently accommodate their growing customer portfolio and meet plans to increase their branches by 25% each year.

Prior to engaging IBM, the bank’s infrastructure was not agile or adaptive enough to support their digital transformation or to accommodate their rapidly growing customer portfolio. The bank introduced a new core banking solution and chose IBM Power Systems to assist the bank in integrating various services to provide a single view for the bank and to enable clients to interact seamlessly.

“With the previous legacy system and application server, the bank’s customer service was inadequate and faced a lot of downtime. With IBM Power Systems and Cloud technology, customer response time has improved by more than 50%,” said Aman Semir, the Vice President of Information System at Cooperative Bank of Oromia.

Previous inefficiencies caused customer and employee dissatisfaction. For example, branch employees used to spend more than 3 hours to close business and would work on Sundays to clear their backlog. With improved servers and innovative reliability, availability and serviceability features, most branches take less than an hour to close business.

“IBM’s Power Systems, which is built for the most complex, mission-critical business priorities, has been a great asset to a bank of our size which is growing at an unprecedented rate. We needed an infrastructure that can handle rapid growth and which could be delivered within our tight budget and IBM most suited what we were looking for,” Semir said.

“IBM’s consultative approach, fast responses to our queries, their professional ethics and capacity of those involved and their willingness to listen and accommodate our needs impressed us,” he added.

With the IBM capabilities, the bank continues to drive fast response times to customer needs which are key to supporting its mostly small and medium-sized businesses and its growing corporate clientele. 

” The Cooperative Bank of Oromia chose IBM to help them rapidly transform into a digital bank and unlock the opportunities to serve their own customers in much more targeted way,” said Nik Nesbitt, General Manager for East Africa, IBM.