The Gauteng Provincial Treasury has issued a five-year tender seeking a bank capable of managing the province’s multibillion-rand centralised banking services account, Gauteng Finance MEC Barbara Creecy said on Thursday.

The current contract with the Gauteng Provincial Government (GPG) was held by FNB and would come to an end next year.

The province’s budget was estimated at more than R90-billion in 2015 and the winning bank would need to manage all the banking transactions, including the payment of salaries of 200 000 officials and supplier payments of about R3-billion a month.

The GPG said in a statement that the winning bank should demonstrate competence to meet the complex corporate and commercial banking requirements, which included the management of a complete, centralised GPG portfolio consisting of about 232 bank accounts, 151 petty cash books and eight trading accounts.

The bank would also be required to handle “very large” transaction volumes of nearly R3-billion worth of salaries a month.

The successful bidding bank must be able to ensure efficient and cost-effective current accounts administration, while providing ongoing electronic banking and systems training to support GPG officials in the effective management of such systems.

“It will also need to introduce internal controls that will prevent and detect any fraud, as well as provide the appropriate skills training and development of GPG officials in all spheres of financial services at no cost to the province,” said the GPG.

Moreover, the bank would need to establish processes to identify and deal with uncleared and unidentified transactions reflected in both the ‘Exchequer’ and ‘Pay Master’ general accounts to minimise the accumulation of uncleared items.

Creecy said government would look to build a sustainable relationship with the winning bidder to realise its broader objectives of radical transformation, modernisation and reindustrialisation.

“Our aim is to utilise the relationship we have with the winning institution to invest in the township economy by availing financial, as well as nonfinancial assistance to small business owners.

“The successful bidder will also work with us to increase the financial literacy of our employees and invest in community programmes to improve the living conditions of our people,” she outlined.

The banking tender formed part of the province’s open tender pilot project, but varied from other tenders issued by government, as there were only four major banks that had been approved as clearing banks for the purposes of opening bank accounts with the provincial governments.

Therefore, only those banks were eligible to submit their bids for this tender. 

The department would publicly open the box and imprint the submitted tenders on the tender closing date of February 6.

They would then be evaluated by the Bid Evaluation Committee, which would make a recommendation to the Bid Adjudication Committee, whose deliberations would be open to the public.

It was expected that the tender would be awarded by mid-2015 to allow the Gauteng Provincial Treasury a 12-month transition and implementation by the successful bidder on the April 1, 2016.