By adopting the SAB AT banking management software package, six umbrella organizations of West African microfinance institutions are pooling their tools and resources. With the ambition to exceed 10 million customers within five years.
The CIF (Confederation of West African Financial Institutions) has just put the SAB AT Core Banking System into production, in a configuration of a multi-institution instance.
The functional scope implemented at CIF includes all the day-to-day operations of the branches and the back office. Its activity is primarily related to microfinance and savings as well as the management of regulatory statements defined by the Bceao (Central Bank of West African States), to which the Decentralized Financial Systems (DFS) are subject.
Indeed, the Core Banking System is an integrated system, with identical characteristics for all agents who have access to it. Scalable, it makes it possible to carry out all the day-to-day operations of a bank, a credit institution, while taking into account legislative parameters.
The project in which several partners of SAB and CIF took part made it possible to implement the software package for the central banking system SAB AT and those of the partners in the fields of desktop publishing (document editing tools), purchasing management and electronic document management.
The success of this project is all the more remarkable, insist its promoters, that it intervenes in the health context that we know, with a ban on travel. The SAB teams assisted the CIF remotely, which underlines the great autonomy on the software solution of the Confederation teams.
Mathieu Soglonou, general manager of the CIF specifies that the software package has already been operational since mid-August in 200 points and 39 banks of the network of Caisses Populaires du Burkina (RCPB). The CIF declares itself “fully satisfied” with the first feedback from its commissioning in the field in Burkina Faso.
Its teams plan, by 2021, to operationalize this system in all six microfinance networks flying the CIF flag in Benin, Mali, Senegal and Togo. The adjustments are still in progress for a 100% exploitation of the potential of the SAB-AT software by the RCPB.
Software to deploy!
By adopting this banking software, “we are modernizing savings and loan cooperatives to reduce the waiting time at the counters.” Indeed, the SAB solution gives members or users the possibility of carrying out, via the mobile phone “SMS Banking”, withdrawal and deposit operations from any location, and of consulting their accounts through remote banking. -banking.
As a result, this new information and management system marks the entry of the CIF network into the digital age with the full digitization, in the long term, of activities for the benefit of its 4.3 million current customers within of the WAEMU (West African Economic and Monetary Union). “With this smart tool, we will increase the total number of beneficiaries of our services to more than 10 million people within five years.”
For its part, SAB welcomed this new operational benchmark, its largest client by size in microfinance. The start of production of SAB AT took place successfully under special conditions due to the Covid-19 health crisis.
“This operation thus validates once again the SAB offer for microfinance institutions”, welcomes the Sopra Banking Software subsidiary. The next steps of the project will consist in deploying SAB to the CIF networks of Senegal, Togo, Benin and Mali.
The CIF is the regional grouping of six financial cooperatives – savings and credit. They were initially grouped together in a company focused on researching innovative financial products and services, called the Financial Innovation Center (CIF-SA).
Today, the CIF is based on the solidarity of six major national federations, in five countries of the WAEMU zone. La Faitière des Caisses Populaires du Burkina (FCPB); the Faitière des Caisses d’Épargne et de Crédit Agricole Mutuel du Bénin (Fececam-Bénin); the ridge of the cooperative savings and credit units of Togo (Fucec-Togo); the Union of Mutual Savings and Credit Banks of Mali; the Network of Caisses d’Epargne et de Crédit du Mali; the Union of Mutuals of the Partnership for the Mobilization of Savings and Credit in Senegal (UM-Pamecas).
