How BMCI successfully launched a digital bank in 4 months and doubled the banking rate of Mauritania in 3 years

About BMCI

Banque Mauritanienne du Commerce International (BMCI) is the leading Mauritanian bank in terms of number of clients and total assets. A leader in B2C banking, offering a full range of banking services to individuals, BMCI also caters to businesses and institutions. Founded to meet Mauritania's diverse financial needs, BMCI offers a very wide range of financial services. Thanks to its commitment to innovation and customer satisfaction, BMCI contributes significantly to Mauritania's economic and financial development.

The banking rate in Mauritania is low (between 20 and 25%), due to the concentration of bank branches in cities. Nouakchott and Nouadhibou account for two-thirds of the country's 310 branches and 78% of ATMs, while 77% of the population lives outside these cities. The SIM card penetration rate is 100%, smartphone penetration is 28%, and internet access is 40%. In this context, it is not surprising that the expanded “banking” channel, i.e. access to basic financial services, is through mobile digital banking.

Based on this observation, in 2021, BMCI launched, in partnership with Skaleet Core Banking, its digital bank under the Masrvi brand. 

Thanks to the mobile application, anyone can carry out everyday transactions: withdrawing and depositing money, transferring money, paying bills and merchants, topping up phone credit.

BMCI faces the challenge of banking

Having identified an opportunity to very quickly provide banking services to Mauritanians in rural areas faced with unsuitable, highly administrative and non-digital “banking” offers, BMCI wanted to launch its digital bank as quickly as possible, with very strong ambitions in terms of growth and the gradual integration of new services.

Masrvi Launch

BMCI quickly set up its bank, thanks to the following key success factors:

• Choice not to use the bank's IT and to deploy a technological infrastructure independent of it (speed boat), based on Skaleet - a new generation SaaS core banking. "Skaleet's core banking was very well suited to our context, allowing great stability and reliability of the service due to the SaaS mode while our competitors are victims of outages and bugs" specifies Mohamed Sidi, Deputy General Manager. "The native multi-language functionality was also an advantage to quickly deploy a product in Arabic and French" he specifies.
• Rapid launch based on the back-end of Skaleet's core banking and its front end (standard mobile application). Then Masvri developed its own applications, connected to the Skaleet core banking, to meet its needs for customizing the customer experience in a context of low financial culture.
• Creation of an ecosystem of billers accepting Masvri payments: deployment of a Masvri agent in each bill payment center (electricity for example).
• Construction of a network of Masvri branded merchants (more than 700 merchants activated in 3 years). The particularity of African countries like Mauritania is that there is no unified and interoperable payment infrastructure. The networks operate in a “closed loop”, that is to say that to pay at a merchant with a Masvri account, the merchant must necessarily be a partner of Masrvi.
• Setting up a 7/7 24/24 call center
• Very aggressive field marketing with the deployment of street marketers
• Freemium model with free products at the start and a strong incentive for merchants

The Success Story

The digital bank Masvri was launched in 4 months in 2021, during the lockdown. “The quality of the project management was exceptional, the onboarding was very efficient and fast, all 100% remote! All deadlines were met,” explains Mohamed.

Adoption was very rapid, helped by the onboarding of more than 700 merchants and large billers (10 million invoice payments made). The growth of the business has been exponential, Masvri has nearly 800,000 customers (77% of the bank's customers, 18% market share in Mauritania and 60% among employees), with a very high activation rate close to 70% and almost exponential growth (4x number of transactions YoY). Deposits have also increased by more than 20% in 2023.

In addition, “the launch of this mass market digital offer has also helped to relieve congestion in our branches which were saturated by the flow (especially during salary payment periods) and to focus on high value-added consulting services in branches,” explains Mohamed. “The average revenue of clients in branches has clearly increased,” he specifies.