Overview

Founded in 1982, the National Bank of Fujairah (NBF) has an excellent reputation for excellence in the areas of corporate and commercial banking, trade finance, and treasury. More recently, they have expanded their range of services to include comprehensive personal banking options and have also stretched out our horizons into the digital world by introducing NBF Digital, showcasing a range of digital products suiting every business’ needs.

i-exceed is a software development company that specializes in developing innovative technology solutions for a wide range of industries, including banking and finance, healthcare, education, and more. The company provides a comprehensive range of software development services, including custom software development, product engineering, cloud computing, and mobile application development.

Implementation Process

NBF had an existing onboarding application which was not gaining much traction in terms of usage. In addition, any changes / additional features required a lot of time and cost to get developed. Hence, NBF wanted to go with an omni-channel solution which enabled greater flexibility and faster time-to-market and i-exceed was involved.

The implementation team deployed for the project consisted of seven resources – 1 onsite program manager, 1 onsite developer, 3 offshore developers, 1 UI/UX developer and a QA tester. I-exceed developed the below applications to cater to the NBF retail onboarding process:

• NBF Instant: A mobile app where users can submit their details (for further processing) and get a restricted account activated
• Fulfillment app: A tablet app exposed to only the NBF internal retail sales agents for further processing and fulfilment of the user submitted applications so that the restricted accounts can be converted to full-fledged accounts on completion of the full KYC.

Benefits Achieved

The previous NBF Instant app had a traction of about 400+ applications only in total for about 2 years. The new mobile app developed significantly improved this traction of having over 600+ account opening applications submitted in a span of 6 months. The new mobile and tablet applications also reduced the response time of identity verification processes such as optical character recognition (OCR) to less than 10 seconds which overall reduced the application input and submission time to less than 5 minutes.

Conclusion

The onboarding solution implemented by i-exceed enabled NBF to complete a customer onboarding process in less than 5 minutes. There was 20% increase in the number of customers that were using digital channels for banking. During times of the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital onboarding solution proved crucial for the bank to build a relationship with its customers and vice versa.

The NBF Connect app that catered to the SME segment, acted as one-stop shop and provided businesses access to a suite of services and solutions in addition to knowledge sharing capabilities. The NBF Connect solution proved very beneficial to NBF as they were able to cater to the SME segment which contributed almost 52% to the country’s GDP according to the UAE Ministry of Economy.

Key Facts:

• Bank Name: National Bank of Fujairah (NBF)
• Bank Founded In: 1982
• Bank HQ: Dubai, UAE
• Vendor Name: i-exceed Technology Solutions
• Solution Implemented: Appzillon Retail Onboarding Solution
• Timeline: 4 months