NCBA seeks IT head amid tech hitches

NCBA #ticker:NCBA wants to hire an IT director amid technical changes in migrating the bank’s systems.

The lender has advertised for the position of group head of Information Technology at the job grade of deputy director, which means the appointee will serve under Geoffrey Githinji, the group director for technology and operations.

The appointment will have a far-reaching role from IT strategy, governance and security and business continuity.

“Key responsibilities include use of domain knowledge and experience to define sufficient resilience for network, hardware, applications together with the accompanying disaster recovery plans,” NCBA said in the advertisement.

NCBA’s technical hiccup arose from planned shift into a uniform platform for all its customers in Kenya and the region following the merger of the former NIC Group and CBA Group.

The upgrade involved bringing all the customers to one platform on the core banking system where the customer data lies and all calculations are done.

NCBA managing director John Gachora said that the process was completed on time and things seemed to work seamlessly at first.

“We were done by Monday morning and everything worked well. But during the week even though you were hearing complaints, those people who went to branches were served well. The issues we used to have at branches service also went away,” he said.

He said the problems stemmed from services offered by third parties affecting its internet and mobile banking platforms.

“Mobile banking, internet banking goes through many other jumps to actually go through the core banking system. When we were saying it is technology we did not mean it is the core banking, but those other peripheral systems which have become what defines customer service today that is mobile banking internet banking,” Mr Gachora said.

And before dust settled, the bank was also back on the spot after Mr Antony Mwangi Ngige, 23, and Ms Ann Wambui Nyoike, 21, two second-year students at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology were accused and charged with stealing Sh25 million from the bank through hacking.

They are also said to have attempted to defraud the lender an additional Sh190.7 million.