The Ghana Rural Banks Computerization and Interconnectivity Project (GRBCIP) which was financed by the government of the United States of America through Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) and managed by the Millennium Development Authority.

The GRBCIP went live in June, 2010 with over 500 VSAT WAN sites spread all over the country with a state-of-the-art Data Centre. The first bank to be migrated unto the Temenos eMerge T24 plaform was Dangme Rural Bank with eight branches including the head office.

Over USD30m wasn spent on the project which was completed by end of February, 2012.

WHAT HAS BEEN DONE SO FAR

The following were accomplished under the GRBCIP;

• As at 30th June, 2011, 52 Rural/Community Banks (RCBs) with 333 branches had been computerised all over the country.
• completion of the construction of a primary Data Centre within the Apex Bank head office with state-of-the-art equipment and other facilities.
• Installation and configuration of Temenos eMerge T24 on Oracle 10g and Redhat Linux Enterprise.
• A dedicated 4MB internet on fibre from Vodafone which had been deployed to over 310 RCB agencies.
• Deployment of bulk SMS facility and Active Directory.
• Deployment of Voice Over IP (VOIP) service over the VSAT WAN.
• Deployment of web based helpdesk system for logging and monitoring of issues.
• Deployment of Eset Nod32 antivirus over the WAN.
• The WAN runs on a 10MB bandwidth for the following applications: eMerge T24, CCC, ACH, Internet and antivirus update. Out of the 10MB, our current utilization is 7MB.
• A total of 16 of the Banking supervision Department (BSD) reports have been developed and are now available on the system for online access.
• As an interim measure, the Apex Bank provided 2 servers to the tune of USD80,000 to the project to help improve server performance whilst the project initiate plans to procure a much bigger and a higher capacity server.
• As part of the measures to help address the challenges at the Data Centre, the project commissioned a team to develop a capacity planning requirement document which will serve as a guide for the capacity planning management for the Centre from now to end of 2013.
• Project kick-off meetings were organized for RCBs before their go-live dates on the eMerge T24 to assess their level of preparedness for the migration.

The Centre is currently being managed by 11 members of staff.