As retail and business customers increasingly call for new digital solutions, many banks across the globe are left trying to work out how to quickly meet these demands without compromising on security and staying compliant with increasingly complex rules and regulations.
Founded in 2006, the digital transformation group Proxym has helped banking customers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa deliver their digital ambitions. During Abu Dhabi Finance Week, The Fintech Times sat down with Wassel Berrayana, founder and CEO of Proxym Group, to discuss how its Bankerise solution is supporting banks across the Middle East and North Africa.
Proxym develops and deploys a digital banking engagement platform, Bankerise, which looks to help financial institutions quicken their time-to-market while leveraging local ecosystems to manage and adapt their business processes to better react to market and legal requirements.
The solution helps streamline the financing process, from application to credit scoring to disbursement, and provides customers with real-time access to finance.
Wassel Berrayana, founder and CEO of Proxym Group
“For six years now, Proxym has developed our Bankerise solution, which is focused on making banks behave and operate as well as fintechs. Nowadays, banks need to operate and innovate like fintechs. They also need to open up their systems to enable fintechs to operate with them, which enables banks to leverage fintech innovation and solutions for their customers to stay competitive.
“Using our local capabilities, we aim to make creating a new touch point with customers much easier. So this platform also comes with ready-made verticals like retail banking, and we are proud that we have customers in retail banking, in France, in the Middle East, but also in North and Sub-Saharan Africa, including in Egypt and Tunisia.
“We are part of 20 deployments in the middle Africa region, with Bankerise, and the list is growing. We’re expecting to power 25 banks and fintechs with Bankerise technology in the near future.”
Leaving banks to control their offerings
“One of the values that Bankerise offers is that we leverage what we call the Bi-Modal IT approach. We help banks to better embrace incoming changes by taking care of all of the security challenges, as well as role management, which changes from one organisation to another.
“A very prevalent challenge for banks is that business users are often asking for impossible time-to-market, while the IT team also encounter several challenges. To address this, our digital engagement platform sits at the centre of the bank. By using Bankerise, banks do not lose control over their security or operations because it enables the IT team to collaborate with business users.
“For example, with Bankerise, it is possible to define use cases, such as if a customer is abroad and transfers over $5,000, it will not just ask for a fingerprint or face ID, but it can also introduce further security measures. Our platform is built to ensure that this can be implemented by the IT team with simple configuration, without needing to rely or call upon our team to come in and change that for them. This solution brings a lot of efficiency and, at the same time, reduces the time-to-market for many offerings.”
Middle Eastern ambition
Berrayana also discussed how the banking ecosystem in the Middle East differs from that of Europe. “When you look at European banks, they have a big legacy of branches, which means investment into their banking systems hasn’t always been the main priority. The European Union has also introduced a number of constraints that restrict innovation – think about the GDPR catastrophe. It’s well-intentioned, but it doesn’t result in the best possible customer experience.
“However, [in the Middle East] there’s much more of a focus on innovation. Customers here also recognise the benefits of going digital – in fact, around 90 per cent of transactions are done digitally in the region. Other than in European neobanks, this is a unique achievement and it is a real differentiator.
“We have customers that have built using our platform for around five years now, creating a set of services, a catalogue – with some boasting over 50 services. This is because digital is perceived so important by the customers.
“Having the technology, but also having a partner that can help you build new requirements is important. Either banks can decide to do it all internally, or keep working with a partner. Proxym is an organisation that has been delivering 30 projects per year for 18 years. With our industrial know-how, we deliver value to our customers. We have been involved with digital development since 2007 – before even the smartphone appeared! So we consider ourselves digital natives that can help banks achieve their digital ambitions.”
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