Commercial Bank of Ethiopia achieves increased Operational Efficiency with GIEOM

CBE is one of 19 commercial banks that operates in the heavily regulated and fiercely competitive Ethiopian banking industry. Like most banks, it focused on the retail and SME business segments sector through financing trade and agriculture.

As the bank embarked on an expansion path to grow the scale and size of its business from a regional/provincial bank into a leading national bank with country-wide operation it ran into the constraints of its antiquated technology and operations infrastructure. In order to achieve its goals, the bank decided to enhance its operational efficiency by strengthening its internal processes and systems. One of the biggest challenges it faced was a compliance framework that was designed for a much smaller scale of business that was not scalable as volume grew and had become not only costly to operate but was also no longer fit for purpose. For example, the compliance confirmation protocols and risks were maintained manually, making timely detection of risk difficult. The absence of a structured and automated method to continually monitor and improve regulatory compliance within the organisation also led to increased stress on the compliance and operations departments of the bank. As a result, customer service was impacted negatively. Battling these inefficiencies, the bank felt it necessary to implement a better way of maintaining regulations, policies and procedures to track the impact of changes and to notify staff.