Core Banking and Choosing the Right Solution
Imagine what banks looked like before 1970. Long queues and particularly long waiting period for just about any transaction was normal. People where customers of a branch and not really a parent bank. All transactions could be performed at your particular branch only. Any entry only reflected after more than 24 hours as information went to data centers in batches at the end of the working day. However, over the next 40 years most banks chose to create a Centralized Online Real-time Exchange or Environment (CORE) to manage their operations, thus giving rise to Core Banking. In India alone, the number of public sector bank branches with core banking implementation went from 79.4% in March 2009 to 90% in March 2010. All over the world, the numbers are closing in on cent per cent. According to US-based research and advisory firm Gartner, core banking system (CBS) is basically a back-end system that performs banking transactions on a daily basis and updates accounts and financial records.