Nigeria Financial Services Shared IT Infrastructure & IT Standards Programme

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Background

Globally, Information Technology has fundamentally transformed the business architecture of Banks resulting in the evolution of new business architectures and approaches to customer service, enterprise management and regulatory compliance.
IT Spend in the Nigerian Financial Services industry, as a proportion of overall operating expenses is high and increasing. However, commensurate value is not realized from these investments due to:

• Complex, duplicate, non-standard and costly processes
• Non-standard systems and infrastructure
• Inefficiency of electronic information exchange
• Data integrity issues

Industry leverage of IT significantly falls short of global best practices, and is limiting banking operating efficiency, cost effectiveness, regulatory information and risk management practices.
To address this gap and provide guidelines for application and utilisation of Information Technology, Industry IT Standards, the Bankers’ Committee in 2010 sponsored the IT Infrastructure Transformation Programme to, among other things, identify and adopt global IT Standards which would provide guidelines for and serve as reference points in ensuring the quality of IT service delivery in the Nigerian Banking Industry. Consequently, the IT Standards were defined to articulate and provide a point of reference for the utilisation of IT in the Banking Industry. Specifically, the IT Standards will provide expected industry practices in respect of:

• Enterprise IT Architecture
• Process architecture
• Systems integration/ Interoperability
• Network/ Communications
• Data Centre Infrastructure 

Adoption and compliance to the defined standards will improve IT leverage and significantly enhance operating efficiency and cost effectiveness of Banks.  The impact of the IT Standards in Bank operations will include improvements in:

• Processing
• Uptime and availability
• Service quality
• Enterprise Control and Management
• Risk Management  and Assurance
• Regulatory reporting
• Business Continuity

Useful links

1. Overview and Summary IT Standards for the Nigerian Financial Services Industry
2. Target Maturity Levels
3. Expected Impacts and Benefits
4. Re-prioritised Industry IT standards
5. IT Standards Adoption Roadmap
6. IT Standards Governance and Interaction Model
7. CBN IT Standards Council ToR
8. IT Standards Blueprint for Deposit Money Banks (DMBs)
9. IT_Standards_Blueprint for Payment Solution Providers (PSPs) and the National Microfinance Banks (NMFBs)

See Frequently Asked Questions on the IT Standards Blueprint