The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) has launched NetGuardians and TeamMate systems to further enhance its capacity to protect customers' data and militate against risks.

The systems were implemented by SOFGEN, a leading global banking technology consulting company which is part of the giant TechMahindra group of companies.

"The trust and support of our customers is critical to our goal of being a world-class commercial bank," says Ephrem Mekuria, Communications Manager at CBE. "Investment in technology that protects against risks like fraud, data theft and information leaks is critical to build trust, as well as to our overall service delivery and performance. NetGuardians and TeamMate systems enable us to see all transaction activities across the Bank from multiple angles, in real-time, round the clock. We can immediately detect any suspicious movements and take preventative action."

Ethiopia's leading bank, CBE, has more than 10.7 million account holders, some 965 branches across the country and assets at approximately 15 billion USD. It is therefore imperative that the Bank puts in place systems to safeguard its operations against frauds and other risks.

NetGuardians and TeamMate systems is designed on the recognition that human behavior is behind fraudulent transactions, and it uses smart behavior analytics based on policy rules and predictive analytics. With Big Data to correlate actions from across the different bank systems, it can identify potential fraud before it happens. It tracks and audits all activities continuously, in real time, and instantly alerts risk managers to any deviations.

NetGuardians CEO Joël Winteregg says, "NetGuardians, together with our implementation partner SOFGEN, is very pleased to be working with CBE. We recognize that CBE is strongly motivated to improve fraud mitigation, operational and IT risk management, transparency, and governance. We are committed to providing them with innovative solutions that are directly aligned with their needs and meet their most serious challenges."

Netguardians is a Swiss-based firm whose fraud tracking and operational risk mitigation software solutions have earned the confidence of banking clients around the world, while TeamMate is the leading global solution for audit management developed by Wolters Kluwer from the UK.

The CEO of SOFGEN in Africa, Tunde Oladele, acknowledged CBE as a progressive and innovative bank which was able to do the project in record time for a bank of its size and scale. "We are very impressed by the CBE team that supported the delivery of this groundbreaking technology in Ethiopia, and we look forward to work in the same way with other Ethiopian banks to bring them to the same level of risk and fraud management that the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia has achieved with this project".

"TeamMate will increase the efficiency and productivity of CBE's entire audit process including: risk assessment, scheduling, planning, execution, review, report generation, trend analysis, committee reporting, storage and data analysis" says David Wagacha, Director TeamMate Consulting East & West Africa.