United Bank of Africa implemented Infosys Finacle’s Finacle Core Banking solution and Finacle Digital Engagement Suite to transform the core banking and digital channels across 19 countries

United Bank of Africa (UBA) PLC is a leading pan-African financial services institution headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria. UBA has a global footprint across the globe operating in 20 African countries i.e. Republique du Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroun, Congo Brazzaville, Congo DRC, Cote d’lvoire, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Tchad, Uganda, and Zambia. The Bank also operates in the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and with a presence in Paris. Moreover, the bank is one of the largest financial services groups on the African continent. UBA offers corporate, commercial, SME, consumer, and personal (retail) banking services to more than 18 million customers, served through diverse channels with more than 1,000 business offices and customer touchpoints. The bank wanted to offer a seamless channel banking experience to its customers and implemented Infosys Finacle’s core banking solution and digital engagement suite.

UBA’s business strategy is built on being the bank of choice for businesses across the African continent. Using the bank’s extensive spread across the continent, it aims to facilitate inter–and-intra-African trade and also be the pivot for the inflow of investment capital. Through the maintenance of a quality balance sheet, the bank will support infrastructural development across the continent and thrive to become the leading bank in Africa’s renaissance.

Implementation Process

UBA realized it needed a state-of-the-art banking platform to support its transformation plans, which would enable it to consolidate its strategic positioning and capitalize on the extensive opportunities in the African market. The chosen platform would not only have to provide the desired functionality but do so in several languages. The multilingual, multi-entity features of Finacle made it an ideal choice.

The bank’s internal team comprised of a cross-functional permanent core with 48 staff and another 65 members from key departments such as, Operations, Information Technology, Audit, Internal Control, Finance, Trade, Risk Management, E-banking, and Treasury, who pitched in when required. There were also representatives from other African countries (besides Nigeria) on the core team. The Finacle team comprised of 20 members along with the 10 members from the alliance partner Computer Warehouse Group. The fact that all three teams – UBA, Finacle, and CWG – worked as one was instrumental in the project being delivered in a record time.

UBA embarked on a major system upgrade to the latest version of Finacle to simplify its processes and significantly improve customer experience across all channels. The ambitious project envisaged a big bang implementation in phases across UBA’s operations in 19 countries. The project involved several complexities, such as migrating data of 14TB for Nigeria alone, migrating 5000+ customizations, multilingual deployments (English, French and Portuguese), and training more than 11,000 users spread over the African continent. The first country went live on Finacle within a year of project commencement. The remaining 18 rollouts in as many countries were completed in the next 14 months. The extremely quick implementation as a result of meticulous planning, enabling simultaneous rollouts across 4 countries.

The project scope covered the implementation of core banking, online banking, Finacle Digital Engagement Hub, and treasury systems for the bank’s 19 country operations. UBA was keen on a short timeline, especially for the core banking and online banking implementations. The 19 implementations – 10 French, 1 Portuguese, and 8 English – were grouped into 5 multi-entity deployments. The bank was recommended to leverage a data replication tool to replicate data to ensure that they did not have to go through an intermediate migration cycle. The latter allowed UBA to undertake a big bang migration to the latest version of Finacle. Standardization of migration, porting and testing activities enabled optimum utilization of human and other resources. Everything was meticulously planned, and particular attention was paid to predicting major risks, their mitigation, and backup plans. A secure, shared portal was used for tracking all requirements and issues online helped to keep the rollout on track, despite problems such as fuel shortages.

UBA realized that they needed to achieve the dual objective of digital transformation by moving towards omnichannel engagements. The bank focused on digitalization and optimization of existing business processes, products, and services to enhance the experience, drive agility, operational excellence, and improved security. At the same time, applying modern technologies to create new sources of revenue, new operating models, and deliver new digital products and services. The bank’s Finacle Digital Engagement HubReduce time to market for newer products and services

• Ensure deep customer engagement at every touchpoint
• Deliver on business outcomes with growth and innovation
• Continue exiting channels of engagement as the bank onboards new ones
• Remove any silos within channels and ensure that data consistency and concurrency is maintained across all channels
• Have a unified view of all channels and manage them with utmost efficiency

The speedy rollout in about 26 months saved UBA considerable time and money. Continuous delivery and testing of customization, and porting line items by the bank ensured smooth SIT/UAT/Rollout phases. The implementation allowed UBA to discontinue many old systems and thereby save USD 350,000 per annum. The project automated processes and integrated information to significantly lower the transaction processing time by over 30%. The time to open a new account today is just two minutes. With a single view of customer information, the bank was able to improve the turnaround time and customer sales and sales capability. The system also enables document capture to digital images reducing paper dependence. There were also several qualitative benefits, such as the closing of regulatory and compliance gaps, avoidance of regulatory sanctions, as well as addressing technological obsolescence.

Challenges Faced

The ambitious project envisaged a big bang implementation in phases across UBA’s operations in 19 countries. The project involved a lot of complexities some of which are highlighted below.

• Migrating a data of 14TB for Nigeria alone
• Migrating 5000+ customizations, multilingual deployments (English, French, and Portuguese)
• Training more than 11,000 users spread over the African continent

Benefits Achieved

As UBA strategizes across its digital strategy around transformation and optimization, it becomes imperative to have a mature system of engagement that can stand the test of changing trends to support their long-term strategy and growth plans. This is where the Digital Engagement Hub from Finacle plays a key role. Some of the key benefits UBA achieved from Finacle Digital Engagement Hub are highlighted below.

• True engagement architecture supporting great experiences, robust cross-sales and nudges for financial well-being
• Channel administration centralizing channel rules and processes on assisted and self-service channels
• Context manager enabling seamless cross-channel customer journeys
• Customer preferences and entitlements management enabling personalized channel experiences across devices and channels
• Service administration for configuring and designing transactions and service experience across channels
• Open API-driven design enabling innovation both inside the bank and in the partner ecosystem

With an open digital banking platform coupled with an advanced customer engagement platform, UBA is much better placed to onboard better, Sell Better, Service Better, and Engage Better.

Some of the quantitative benefits achieved by UBA are highlighted below.

• Increase in the customer base: UBA experienced a quantum leap in its customer base with an increase of over 28%. There was an increase in the number of new products that were introduced into the market
• Faster time to market for new products: Launching a new product and rolling it to the market takes just one week whereas it used to take a month earlier. Also, social media integration has contributed to faster rollout of products with fewer resources employed
• Increased revenues: UBA has seen an increase in revenue with the bank introducing contemporary value-adding products and service offerings
• Faster customer service: With the advantage of a 360-degree view of the customer, the customer service time has dropped drastically by 67%
• Greater operational efficiency: The bank has witnessed immense operational benefits due to process optimization. For instance, the time to open a new account has decreased by over 67%, while the cost of transaction across channels has reduced by 80%, post-core transformation
• Greater agility: United Bank for Africa is now able to launch a new branch in a single day vis-à-vis four days it used to take earlier
• Achieving greater scalability: The transaction peak load capacity has now increased by over 25%. The average number of transactions processed in a day has also more than doubled since go live
• Optimization of cost across channels: The unification of various touchpoints with a digital engagement platform has helped UBA better understand customer behavior across segments, as well as their product and channel preferences. The upgraded Finacle solution helped them optimize channel usage and migrate low-cost transactions to low-cost channels

Conclusion

The Finacle Core Banking, Online Banking and Finacle Digital Engagement Hub implementations at UBA were a great success. Finacle Treasury was implemented in Nigeria and other subsidiaries even before Finacle Core Banking.

Key Facts

Bank: United Bank of Africa
Headquarters: Lagos, Nigeria
Supplier:  Infosys Finacle
Solution: Finacle Core Banking Solution and Finacle Digital Engagement Suite
Timeline: 2019