Home grown systems definitely have an advantage over off the shelf package because it is developed keeping in view the user specific requirements and incorporate the best of functionality available in the market. The only catch is early planning and luxury of time available with the bank as it takes very long to develop and test a core banking system.

Way back in early 90's we in ANZ in India had developed in-house a Trade Finance system. It was developed to be used for initial few years till replaced by some off the shelf global application. Later we assessed many applications but unfortunately no one was meeting all the features that we had in our application. Hence it survived till the bank was acquired by SCB and TF merger completed in early Sept 2002. The application later was doomed.