Diamond Bank UK in tech review
New owner, new tech?
Diamond Bank UK (DBUK) is understood to be reviewing its legacy technology set-up, following the arrival of the new owner.
DBUK, formerly a subsidiary of Nigeria’s Diamond Bank, changed hands last year – it is now owned by Sanjeev Gupta, a UK industrialist and owner of GFG Alliance group and Wyelands Bank.
It focuses on wholesale banking (corporate and correspondent banking), supporting the international trade, payments and associated FX needs of clients and, unsurprisingly, has strong ties with West Africa.
On its website, the bank states that its business “is driven by innovation and leading edge technology”. For its technology, DBUK has been using the Flexcube core banking system from Oracle FSS for many years, installed as part of a group-wide roll-out at Diamond Bank.
FinTech Futures understands that the assessment of the existing IT set-up is now underway at DBUK. The bank is believed to be considering a number of systems besides the incumbent, including Temenos’ T24, Mambu and ERI’s Olympic (as Gupta’s other bank, the aforementioned Wyelands, uses Olympic as its core system).
FinTech Futures contacted the bank for a comment but received no response.
Over the last couple of years, Diamond Bank in Nigeria had shed its international locations. In 2017, it sold its West African network of subsidiaries in Benin, Togo, Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal to a Cote d’Ivoire-based financial services company, Manzi Finances, for €61 million. It then sold its UK subsidiary, and became a purely domestic institution; and now it is in the processes of being acquired by another local entity, Access Bank. The merger is expected to be completed in H1 this year. Both banks run Flexcube for their core tech.
