CIMB Group maintains IT spend at RM350mil

Eddy said: Good move. That's what a market at current condition need. Indeed, competitve advantages don't come easily.


PETALING JAYA: CIMB Group will maintain its information technology (IT) spending at RM350mil in Malaysia this year, says group information and operations head Iswaraan Suppiah.

He said continued IT spending was important in ensuring that the group provided good service to its customers as customer experience was something that should not be compromised even in hard times.

“The majority of the spending would be for IT system maintenance-related services and licensing cost for the systems,” he told a press conference yesterday after the inking of an agreement with Hewlett-Packard (M) Sdn Bhd (HP Malaysia).

Iswaraan added that the banking group spent a similar amount for IT annually.


The partnership agreement with HP Malaysia was for the roll-out of HP’s Thin Client technology across CIMB Bank and CIMB Islamic Bank branches nationwide.

The environment-friendly Thin Client is a computing solution that functions as an access point to a centralised processing and storage unit (server).

The technology would help lower energy consumption by an average of 80% compared with traditional desktop solutions, thus reducing greenhouse gas emission.

Iswaraan said the company would spend RM30mil for this solution over five years and this would help save up to RM40mil in maintenance-related expenses and energy consumption over the same period.

“We are phasing out the deployment of this solution and we aim to deploy it to all our branches by year-end from the current two branches,” he said, adding that the bank currently had about 360 branches nationwide.

He said the new solution would help CIMB serve its customers better as the computers would be faster, more secure and reliable and cut down the waiting time significantly.