In the 21st century, the business environments are highly dynamic and people needs to access their money in the bank just as in their pocket. To answer this fast access need of a customer it is difficult for a single bank because it needs billions of dollars to afford enough banking access channels and to open a new branch office. As the result of economic growth in the country, the flow of currency is highly increased from time to time. It’s known that banking institutions are the mid player and catch the higher position in the economic environment. Ethiopia set a Gross Transformation Plan (GTP) to reach the country to the mid-income country.
To succeed this GTP the National bank of Ethiopia (NBE) set a goal on different government and private organizations. The recent improvement in technological advancement is encouraging because all of the banks in the county deploy the core banking system and linked it with a national switch called Ethswitch. Even though some advancement in using recent technologies there are also some issues which should be addressed. The issues include:
- The inability of the individual bank to provide full banking infrastructure to their customer.
- Delay in the current integrated system: If the card user tries to access the ATM or POS terminal out of their respective bank there is a problem of delay or not working.
- Duplication of effort: It is better to integrate the ATM or POS(Point Of Sell) terminal of the bank directly to the national switch; i, e no intermediate switches are required. Another duplication of effort is an attempt to deploy costly technologies and software systems individually.
- Technological change: The advancement in technology like smartphones, personal computers, and World Wide Web initiate peoples to mobilize their remote information by their own device.
Hence these changes enforce financial institutions to change their existing system and deploy up to date system that supports recent technological advancement.
Involvement of foreign bank: Since Ethiopia became the member of world trade organization forces to open her door for foreign banks increased; especially from the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and from the friendship countries. Currently some of the banks open their office in Addis Ababa. As many economists suggest this situation increases competition among the domestic and the foreign banks. Therefore strengthening the technology power and multiplying their access channel of the domestic bank is a must.
Cloud computing has generated a tremendous amount of interest and excitement in recent years as it gives a new and useful way to address IT challenges across and beyond financial services. Cloud computing is an IT-servicing technology built on the idea of exploiting virtualization technology’s shared resource pooling, as well as it can solve the problems with interoperability. Hence, this study will answer the following three research questions.
- Do we need to make the banking activities in Ethiopia interoperable?
- Which banking activities are a candidate for a shared service delivery?
- Could cloud computing be an alternative solution for creating interoperable ICT service provisioning strategy for EBI(Ethiopian Banking Industry)?
