Central Bank of Nigeria to fine-tune ICT initiatives

Apex Bank, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), has restated its commitment to ICT initiatives in an annual report released early this month. Efforts over the past year have successfully linked deposit money banks within CBN's network, and initiatives involving Oracle Learning Management System and two modules of the Corporate Performance Management System have also been completed. Under CBN's "Impacts of Project Eagles Initiatives," it has executed the Enterprise Resource Planning application, which is an Oraclebased package meant to automate the bank's business processes.

According to the report, automation affects everything "from dayto- day office activities like inventory, leave processing [and] payment orders to periodic processes like payroll [and] general ledger." "[The new system] ensures transparent audit trails of transactions and online business intelligence reports," CBN states.

In addition, the bank has introduced an inter-bank payment system for high-value fund transfers based on the Real Time Gross Settlement application. This is expected to reduce incidences of overdrawn accounts and the associated systemic risk in the industry.

The annual report stated that CBN has recorded a gross annual income of US$172.8 billion for 2007, a decrease of 9.8 percent from the previous year, which is attributed to the rising cost of operations and foreign currency revaluation. Total assets of Apex Bank, however, rose by 18.4 percent, reflecting an increase in external reserves, loans and advances, investments and other assets.

By Remmy Nweke