UBA unleashes its remittance potential with RemitONE’s platform & portals

Background

UBA is one of the most respected banks in Africa. They operate a domestic and cross-border remittance business, Africash, via hundreds of branches across their multi-national business covering 20 countries. Despite their strong reputation and the Africash brand, their remittance business was not performing so well.

The heart of the problem was that their legacy system did not support a 3^rd party remittance channel, nor was it capable of supporting any other new initiatives. The cost, effort and time involved in issuing system changes meant that it was both a significant overhead and a hindrance which dragged down business performance.

Business Challenge

More specifically, UBA required more extensive remittance functionality:

• Support for multi-national branch network/integration with core banking systems
• Integration with value-add partners (e.g. Mobile network operators)
• Support for 3^rd party agents
• Compliance/fraud prevention
• Strong system security as part of a bank branch network
• A better way of managing system maintenance & updates
• An online & mobile customer experience

Money Transfer Solution

RemitONE provided UBA with the following solutions:

• Money Transfer Engine™ (MTE), the industry leading money transfer platform used by banks and MTOs worldwide
• Agent Remittance Manager™ (ARM), an agent based money transfer system, to allow UBA’s own agents and 3^rd party agents to create transactions in a secure and compliant manner
• RemitONE Connections – a service which creates a relationship between senders and payers in the RemitONE network
• The opportunity to implement RemitONE’s Online Remittance Manager™ (ORM), the online self-service remittance platform, to let UBA’s customers create transactions online through laptops, tablets and smartphones

However, just as important as the platform solution to the overall success was the implementation project itself which included:

• Integration of the RemitONE solution with UBA’s core banking system (Finacle)
• Custom development to support enhanced security features and UBA’s 3^rd party agent management processes
• Skilling the UBA team to offer 1^st line support to their community.
• Linux-ProgreSQL-PHP stack training to UBA’s technical team in order to overcome an initial reluctance to adopt a different technology platform.

UBA now has an end-to-end money transfer platform that offers the following features:

• A compliant system with robust KYC procedures and AML checks
• A robust web-based technology platform that can scale & be rapidly deployed across hundreds of branches in 18 countries
• Integration with their core banking platform
• Ability to handle the 3^rd party agent network & expansion of other agent networks
• Security in-line with their internal policies
• Reduced cost of ownership of the remittance platform
• Access to a wider sending network through RemitONE Connections
• Significantly increased ROI & enhanced customer experience

Business Benefits

Since adopting the RemitONE platform, UBA has realised the following benefits:

Unleashed Potential – Replacing their legacy system with RemitONE’s modern industry-leading platform has unshackled the business from that which was constraining it. They have retained the security and integration expected in a core financial platform.

Significant Cost Reduction – With the latest remittance technologies, UBA is able to realise a better cost of ownership profile for its remittance platform, at the same time offering much more functionality to its users and customers.