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Banks move to meet deadline on global certification

By BusinessNews Staff on November 16, 2013

Deposit Money banks have begun moves to meet the 2015 deadline given by the Central Bank of Nigeria for banks to certify their operations in line with the International Standard Organisation’s information security management systems.

The Executive Director, Global Infoswift, Mr. Afolabi Oke, confirmed this in Abuja on Thursday.

He said already, banks had started discussing with the company on how to enable them to get the certification.

Global InfoSwift had last week facilitated the CBN’s certification to ISO 27001.

The CBN, during the presentation of the award, said that it expected financial institutions, particularly banks, to comply with the ISO standard latest by 2015.

The CBN certification, which is the ISO 27001 –2005 for information security, was awarded to the bank by the British Standards Institute.

With the conferment, the CBN has now joined the league of international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that have gone through the certification audit conducted by the institute.

He said, “A couple of banks have invited us because we have done it for the central bank. They want us to help them as well because, in a way, it will help them with the cash-less society initiative that the CBN is promoting and will ensure that they are able to protect the confidentiality of customer information.”

Oke said the government, as an institution, needed to obtain international standards and stressed that it would attract the confidence of investors into the country.

This, according to him, will help to boost Foreign Direct Investment.

He said, “As a country, we must embrace standards. Many of our products cannot be exported because they are not certified to meet international standards.

“It is also important for government agencies to embrace certification because it helps to improve our internal processes.”

The Managing Director, Global Infoswift, Mr. Solomon Edun, said, “The central bank’s certification is a project that we prosecuted and Global Infoswift, as a company, went through the same process and today, we are equally going to receive our certificate for two international standards. One is for information security and the other is for business continuity.

“When we operate according to international standards, there are many organisations that are making use of these international standards because they will know that the same standard they find in Europe is what they are getting here and the implication for us is that now, we will see more Foreign Direct Investments in the country.”

[Punch]

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