How a traditional bank built the country’s leading digital bank in 10 years

Context and Launch 

In a context of a population with a low banking rate, low penetration of smartphones and with a limited network of branches, the bank selected Skaleet in 2015 to roll-out a nationwide agency banking business with a focus on salary payment, bill payment, peer-to-peer transfers as well as merchant acceptance.

This new product from the bank revolutionized the sector in the country by offering a bank account accessible via mobile phone. With this innovation, users can make remote payments and transfers to anyone. Indeed, the bank's wallet stands out as the first interoperable service in the country, allowing users to transfer money from one bank's wallet account to another, regardless of the telecommunication network used.

Innovation and Use Cases

The bank's wallet offered the country's first card linked to a mobile account and enabled cardless ATM withdrawals. Salary payment has become the wallet’s flagship feature, which is used to pay the salaries of 30% of the country's civil servants. The digital wallet also offers bill payments, which is the bank’s second most used feature, as well as cash-in and cash-out operations, and loans.

Additionally, the bank's wallet allows for payments in two currencies, meeting the varied needs of its clientele and reinforcing its role as a leader in banking innovation in the country.

Evolution with Skaleet

The breadth of Skaleet's Product Catalog as well as its Continuous Delivery process allowed the bank's wallet to launch new products and services regularly as well as features for the bank’s teams.

• Beg of 2014: the bank/Skaleet commitment to launch a Mobile Banking service
• H1 2015: launch of the bank's wallet
• Q2 2015: launch of cardless withdrawals at ATMs (SMS-based)
• Q1 2016: 1 debit card issued by the bank's wallet
• End of 2019: 500,000+ clients and 2000+ agents
• 2020: expansion of services to Skaleet’s Analytics module
• 2021: first loan by the bank's wallet
• Q2 2022: 1M customers
• Q2 2023: Go-live M-Visa
• Q4 2023: 30k consumer loans
• Q1 2024: launch of Salary Advance and Instant Credit
• Q3 2024 (planned): account recharge by card

After a 10 year long relationship, the partnership between Skaleet and the bank has been renewed and we are committed to continue helping the bank to develop the bank's wallet and expand its products portfolio to other types of loans and savings products.

Banking Context in the Country

The traditional banking model addresses a very limited portion of the population and the country is massively unbanked. As a consequence, financial operations such as salary payments are highly cumbersome and inefficient.

Less than 10% of the population of the country holds a bank account and the traditional network of branches is not relevant to address the rest of the population efficiently. Maintaining a network of branches in a country larger than France, Germany and Italy together and with limited infrastructure is extremely complex from an operational as well as a profitability point of view especially considering that the GDP per capita is among the lowest in the world.

Solution and Strategy

The bank’s founders felt the need to turn to digital at a time when the banking sector was at a turning point. They therefore decided to launch a digital banking product which also responded to other challenges.
The bank's wallet was set up for three main reasons: to relieve congestion at the bank’s branches, to extend the bank’s geographical reach by distributing banking services outside branches, and to cut costs by achieving economies of scale. The creation of the bank's wallet enabled the bank to cut costs while continuing its banking business with cash-in-cash-out being outsourced.

The bank leadership had a vision that matched Skaleet’s value proposition: deploying an off-the-shelf platform and other modules to boost financial inclusion thanks to digital solutions. Progressive evolutivity of the services was also a key component of the bank's wallet strategy to ultimately make a full blown digital bank offering loan and savings products.

The main use case addressed by the bank's wallet was the payment of salaries for government employees who could then withdraw the money from agents. This use case was supported by ancillary features, such as P2P payments. The service then quickly expanded with the roll-out of game changing features every 2 months as part of Skaleet’s Continuous Delivery process.

The bank's wallet leverages a large portion of Skaleet’s Product Catalog including the Core Banking Platform, various front ends intended for different internal and external stakeholders of the platform (employees, customers, merchants and companies) as well as the Loan Module.

The Success

• The bank's wallet onboarded 1.5M end customers and more than doubled the number of the bank customers
• Quickly implemented a credit offer: 3x loans distributed
• Skaleet processes 100k+ transactions daily on average
• The bank's wallet managed to find an adequate cost/revenue structure to support profitability of the business