Curbs hit BSP’s K400mil project

BANK South Pacific (BSP) had to delay its core banking project worth around K400 million last year due to travel restrictions imposed as a result of the Covid-19, says group chief executive officer Robin Fleming.
Fleming said the 12-month delay in the project saw the indirect cost to the bank being the best part of K40 million to K50 million over the course of the project. He said other infrastructure upgrade projects were not completed which the cost to the bank would be an additional K5 million to K10 million in every country it operated.
“The Covid travel restrictions did affect some of the capital expenditure projects we had planned in PNG and around the Pacific as we were not able to travel to be able to implement them,” he said.
“At a headline level, the biggest project is our core banking project and that’s a project which in total is round about K400 million.
“Our core banking system which we were targeting to go live at the end of last year but as our support partners were not able to travel into PNG, that also affected our capability to hit our target of last November. We are now looking at April for the first implementation in Vanuatu.
“And then, we are targeting the end of this year for Papua New Guinea to go live.
“We’ve got other projects associated with the infrastructure for our disaster recovery for each country which has our banking system, telecommunication system and the like and we were not able to complete that as much as possible.”
Fleming said the bank was looking at progressing with these and other projects and improving and introducing digital products with their platform pack joint venture and other projects in Papua New Guinea which were digital related through internet payment gateways as well.