Macau's central bank signs up to Financial Objects

The Monetary Authority of Macau (AMCM), the central bank of the Chinese Special Administrative Region (SAR) of Macau, has adopted UK-based software company Financial Objects' activebank=B2 system to support its banking operations.

The central bank, previously known as the Monetary and Foreign Exchange Authority of Macau, prior to the establishment of the Macau SAR when Portugal returned Macau to China in 1999, bought accounting, treasury, risk management and payments modules of the system, as part of a larger project that includes human resources and purchasing. The system will be rolled out in AMCM’s corporate headquarters and business groups across the organisation in 2003.

Through the purchase, AMCM hopes to improve its straight-through processing rates, reduce risk and improve efficiency and accuracy across its operations. It also expects to benefit from reduced processing costs, allowing it to shift resources from tactical to more strategic processes. Its legacy system, written in Portuguese, had needed considerable manual intervention and was not fully integrated with the rest of the bank’s infrastructure.

“We needed to find a one-stop solution for our core financial operations. Not only did the system have to tie together our banking applications in one easy-to-use platform, it also needed to be flexible enough to adapt to constantly evolving requirements,” said Rufino Ramos, executive director of AMCM. “After conducting an exhaustive review of vendors, we realised that activebank=B2 offered the sophisticated, user-friendly and extensible technology we were looking for. We are firmly committed to establishing a long and successful partnership with Financial Objects.”

Steve Thurley, Asia-Pacific director at Financial Objects, said the move marks the company’s first foray into the Chinese market and it is seeking to extend its presence in the region.