Bank of Ghana chooses GAMMA
Budapest, February 2022. Bank of Ghana and ABRIS signed an agreement in November 2021 to implement GAMMA at the bank. The Transact-specific tool will reinforce the central bank’s IT operations by comprehensive core banking monitoring and the automation of manual processes. Another key feature of consideration was GAMMA’s ability to minimize the need to directly access Transact.
November talks in Ghana
Talks with the country’s central bank started before the pandemic, but were on hiatus in 2020 due to the year’s unfortunate global health events. This year, sides have picked up the thread in person during ABRIS CEO Zsolt Godry’s visit to Accra. The project has greatly benefited from the all-round support by local stakeholders. Hungarian Trade and Economic Attaché, Tamas Ary facilitated the talks on the diplomatic level. ABRIS’ local sales and support partner, First Vision Technologies Ltd. laid the groundwork on the business side. FVT’s Mr Dickman Adarkwah highlighted,
‘We are committed to providing excellent support to Bank of Ghana to ensure the best customer experience.’
Core banking monitoring is key
Bank of Ghana’s original requirements focused on the monitoring and automation of their Temenos Transact system. In particular, the scope accentuated interface monitoring, with special attention to the performance of ATM and Internet Banking processes. In the case of ATM monitoring, GAMMA follows transaction processes; it checks whether these were successful and how much time they spent in the application. Furthermore, the tool also alerts in case of any security events that the core banking monitoring components detect. GAMMA also checks workloads, the number of pending transactions, and uses the data to create transaction statistics. Similarly, the tool is also capable of showing transactions queues for Internet Banking, which helps the Bank detect processing bottlenecks. Another key point is that monitoring allows the client to pinpoint errors and analyse job processing times.
Designed with bank’s actual needs in mind
During the final stretch of the talks, the Bank has extended the range of these specifications with a request for logged and controlled access to the core banking app. Although this feature is often overlooked next to its monitoring and automation capabilities, GAMMA can fulfill this demand without the need for further development.
Two major GAMMA modules help eliminate the need to provide every operator with authorization to access the core banking system and the application servers.
The first is Administration Dashboard, which allows operators to run predefined Transact, TAFC/TAFJ, and OS-level commands to collect logs and information to send to sysadmins or developers to accelerate the resolution process. Operators can run these diagnostic commands from the tool in a secure, audited manner. This means that there is no need to provide root access to the OS or Transact. Furthermore, Enterprise Level Scheduler allows operators to run preset Temenos Transact functions in an automated manner from the GAMMA UI. This helps eliminate human error and the need to access the core banking system itself. Not only do these modules limit the possibility of undesired actions and mistakes, but they also log every action taken. Moreover, banks can precisely define the avenues of action available to different users via GAMMA’s authorization roles and groups.
Steps towards implementation
The ABRIS team gave a successful demo one week after the visit to show the requested features in action. The final negotiations ended in the signing of the contract in November. The implementation will start early in 2022.
More about GAMMA: https://abrisconsult.com/gamma
Inquiries: https://abrisconsult.com/contact-us