Dr. Tumubweine Twinemanzi, the Executive Director Supervision, at Bank of Uganda (BoU), has challenged the financial services sector to adopt a shared technology services delivery model. Thereby cutting down the cost of doing business and pass on those benefits to customers in form of reduced cost of lending.
Twinemanzi, was speaking during the first executive round-table for business and ICT leaders as well as regulators organised by Raxio Data Centre and Oracle — to discuss how enterprises can manage operational costs by leveraging cloud technologies.
“We have reached a stage where financial institutions should compete based on the quality of services and the appropriateness of their products and not on how beautiful or how brandy-new their infrastructure or systems are, said Twinemanzi.
He applaud Raxio for their effort on this, saying; “What Raxio is trying to do (shared services) is something that we’ve been trying to do in the financial services sector. Financial institutions should focus on their core business which is intermediation—mobilizing deposits and extending credit.”
The financial services industry in Uganda has over the last 10 years has seen average cost to income rations rise to 74.6%, compared to 66.7% in 2008. As a result, average lending rates increased to a 10 year average of 22.16% from 20.39% in the same period.
Twinemanzi challenged Raxio and Oracle to explore especially introducing shared software as a service — not just for Oracle but also for other software solutions, such as accounting, core banking solutions and credit analysis modules.
Raxio is developing a state of the art collocation, enterprise grade and carrier neutral data centre at Namanve Industrial Park. The data centre is being developed to tier III grade and is expected to be completed in Q2 of 2019.
Oracle on the other hand, has developed, Cloud at Customer — a cloud based solution that allows Ugandan based organisations to enjoy cloud services either in a collocation data centre such as Raxio’s or customers’ owned data centres.
Speaking at the event, Joachim Steuerwald, the Oracle Cloud Platform Sales Director, said with increased reliability on digital mobile solutions for virtually everything, it was a critical mission that service providers invest significantly in reliable systems.
“We’re increasingly becoming a digital economy. Customers can’t event tolerate our digital services being down for even an hour. This requires the ICT behind those businesses to be available 24/365. Building these highly reliable systems requires that we’ve the right environment,” he said.
He further said that the Oracle is interested in a partnership with Raxio to solve the significant constraint to achieve the kind of uptimes that a digital economy demands.[related-posts]
“Many of the data centres in the region are fairly old. Before Raxio decided to enter the market, we did not have any single Tier III data centre in the region. And therefore out interest in a partnership with Raxio,” he said.
James Byaruhanga, Raxio General Manager, said that with shared infrastructure and software solutions, the kind that will be ushered in by a Raxio and Oracle partnership most stakeholder fears will be addressed.
“The whole idea about shared infrastructure is to reduce the cost of cost of ownership, reduce operational expenses, allowing you to be more efficient and provide a better service to customers,” Byaruhanga. said in his final remarks.
