Finance: To augment the dissemination of credit information to financial institutions, individuals and commercial entities, the Credit Information Bureau (CIB) has upgraded its system to Silver Blade 2.0, which was launched yesterday.

In 2014, the Financial Sector Development Action Plan recommended the CIB to further improve its system to include data from utility providers like the telephone companies, electricity, water and insurance, among others. This was found necessary to provide more comprehensive information and credit history of the borrowers.

An official from the Asian Development Bank, which provided the technical assistance, said the new system would make access to finance easier. This is viewed as a critical component for financial inclusion.

The Silver Blade software will facilitate transparent and efficient flow of credit information to both the borrowers and lenders.

For instance, the software is capable of facilitating 1 million transactions in less than 30 minutes and instantly updates it on the repository. This means that if an individual closes his/her loan account with a bank, in less than 20 minutes the CIB will update the portfolio of that client.

The financial institutions use the CIB services to fetch credit history of their clients.

Should a client default their loan or avail additional loan with any of the banks, the new system will immediately alert all the banks.

Silver Blade is designed to drastically reduce the time taken to process loans and reduce the rate of default.

The new system is also designed to report risk and stipulate the financial horoscope of borrowers.

Features in the system would also allow banks to compare their credit portfolio over certain durations and among each other, thereby promoting competition. “You can slice and dice the data and its more of a business intelligence tool,” said a representative from Dun and Bradstreet, the developer of the software and a leading global provider of credit bureau solutions.

The Asian Development bank provided a grant of USD 500,000 to upgrade CIB’s system from Credit Verdict to Silver Blade.

The finance minister Lyonpo Namgay Dorji launched the Silver Blade yesterday.

CIB, meanwhile was established by the Royal Monetary Authority (RMA) with all the financial institutions as founding members with financial assistance from ADB in 2009.

It was delinked from RMA in 2013 and it is now a fully registered and licensed company with a paid up capital of Nu 25 million. RMA holds 44 percent of the capital and the balance is held equally by the eight financial institutions of the country.

Tshering Dorji