Evaluation of HiCORE: Multi-tiered Holistic Islamic Banking System based on User Acceptance Test

Holistic Islamic Banking System (HiCORE) is a virtual multi-tiered system adopting the Services Orientation Architecture (SOA) and parameter driven modules to create new Islamic banking products based on Syariah laws. Islamic banking or Islamic finance reflects banking or financial business that is not contradictory to the principles of Islamic law. This is statutorily mentioned in both the Islamic Banking Act 1983 and the Banking and Financial Institutions Act 1989. In Malaysia, for the creation of Islamic banking products, flexibility is given to practitioners, regulators and Syariah advisors to create and introduce unlimited Islamic banking products to support Islamic banking business. If in the conventional manner, banks may take at least six months for new Islamic products to be created, HiCORE can ensure the possibility of creating an Islamic product at less than a quarter of the time span taken or less (taking into consideration that all policies and processes needed to carry out the transactions are in place). HiCORE went through the normal evaluation process: unit testing, System Integration Test (SIT) and User Acceptance Test (UAT). This paper highlights the latter but unique to the testing of HiCORE, as the UAT is conducted by a Panel of Experts, represented by 15 members from the Islamic Banking industry in the country. Generally, results of the UAT conducted, indicated positive results by the panel of experts. However, there were some specific features and functionalities that needed improvement. In fact one of the features of the system on new product creation which allows users to see the Source of the Dalil (Al-Quran verses or Sunnah), Hukum dan the Syarat during new product creation makes HiCORE novel.