As part of its digitization drive, Bangladesh Bank (BB) is well on the way to automate its business processes with a view to providing better services to people and strengthening its oversee job.

The IT Department of BB has so already initiated to develop 80 software to achieve the goal of digital central banking, BB sources said.

The automation process of BB is going on under a Central Bank Strengthening Project (CBSP), which commenced in 2003 with the financial assistance of World Bank.

But the project gained momentum in last one and half years and is expected to be completed by December 31, 2012, said the BB sources.

Under the CBSP project, bank-wide connectivity has already been established and all 10 offices of BB are now connected in a single-network through local and wide area networks.

The central bank officials are now sharing various banking applications on enterprise resource planning, enterprise data warehouse, electronic fund transfer (EFT), among others, through this network. Around 3,000 computers are now connected with the network while a secured disaster recovery site has also been established at Mirpur for data recovery.

An Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) system under the project is now in full operation in BB offices under which BB officials can see their salary slip, account balance, status of loan and advance, different sorts of personal information at their own desks through the intranet system.

The Daily Sun/Bangladesh/ 2nd April 2012