Case Study: First Alliance Bank Zambia achieves a two-hour daily close and 70% IT support cost reduction with Oracle

First Alliance Bank Zambia Cuts Daily Close from Six Hours to Two Hours and Reduces IT Support Costs by 70%

First Alliance Bank Zambia, a commercial bank headquartered in Lusaka serving some 3,000 corporate customers, faced slow end-of-day closes, lengthy branch and online transaction times, rising IT support costs and overnight staff overtime, and constraints in power, space and scalability needed to roll out ATMs, issue VISA cards and enter retail banking.

By migrating Oracle FLEXCUBE to Oracle’s SPARC T4-1 servers, Oracle Solaris and Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance (implemented by partner Neurotech), the bank cut its daily close from six hours to two, reduced transaction processing from about 20 minutes to 3–5 minutes, and lowered IT support costs by 70%. The consolidated, single-vendor platform also reduced power and rack-space use, eliminated overtime for period closes, sped up issue resolution via My Oracle Support, and provided the performance and scalability to expand ATM, card and retail services.

First Alliance Bank Zambia

Nyawengo Mwale

Head – ICT