| dc.description.abstract | The banking industry in Kenya has been struggling in a hyper competitive
environment since the days of economic market liberalization. In current years the
competition has been extremely intense with each bank fighting for its survival
against competitors who do not only want to remain cost effective,drive profit but
also attract and retain customers. This has driven the banks to embrace information
technology to reduce the pressure to operate efficiently and profitably, as well as to
provide those services that are provided in the rest of the world as today's customer
is no longer localized but globalized and his needs are no longer limited to his
location. The Automated teller machine (ATM) has been one way in which the
banks have embraced technology to provide better services to their customers. The
deployment of ATMs has brought with itself challenges which were not apparent in
the beginning, challenges like lack of skill, need for huge amounts of capital, lack
of executive time to manage the ATM channel, security considerations and many
others. These challenges have driven banks to look at outsourcing as one of the
ways to mitigate these challenges.
The objective of this study was to highlight the ATM service outsourcing models
used in Kenya and the challenges that Kenyan banks have faced when outsourcing
these services. All the banks in Kenya were surveyed. The study highlights the
practices and the challenges. In this study senior bank managers that is ATM
managers and IT managers were targeted to give a representative response to the
survey.
The survey revealed that several models are used in outsourcing of ATM services in
Kenya, that there is no one prevalent model and that most of the banks own their
own assets. The survey reveals that one of the major benefits the banks seek to
achieve when outsourcing is to spur innovation followed closely by the need to
improve customer service. It further indicated that challenges that are considered of
importance are loss of control and some of the services being considered too critical
to outsource. The report indicates that employee resistance to outsourcing is not
considered a serious challenge when making the outsourcing decisions.
Further research may be undertaken in Kenya on the subject of ATM services
outsourcing to cover such areas as outsourcing failures, outsourcing risks,
development of outsourcing partners and outsourcing partner selection. | en |
