Banking Infrastructure in Libya: Building an Efficient and Secure Banking Infrastructure

One of the main challenges in Libyan banking system is the banking infrastructure. For a country to effectively attract foreign investment and boost domestic economic growth, a sound banking infrastructure is a must.

According to Ahmed Rajab, “This is the major problem for the banking sector and not just the banking sector, but for the government itself and any company or ministry. Unfortunately, we have a lack of proper communication in the country itself. I joined the bank just one year ago and unfortunately when I came here, most of the problems stemmed from the core banking system which caused problems on a daily basis. We also faced daily problems with our customers who think the failure was on our side, but unfortunately it is out of our control because it’s related to the poor communications system in Libya.”

“We have 150 branches and only 85 of them have been connected to the fiber or wireless system and the rest of the branches are not linked at all by the core banking system because they are in remote locations and there is no proper communication there. So we don’t have any options to connect to them with the core banking system. They are still running on very old systems, each bank separately and therefore there are problems with collecting information, especially to create a balance sheet on a monthly or daily basis. It’s very difficult on a daily basis to get the information from the banks for example from the south or east of the country,” Rajab continues.

Now, the government is working hard to provide fiber for all areas of the country. In the last few months, the ministry of communication, has given around 23 VSAT services licences to improve the internet services. At the same time the ministry is working on the fiber optic network.