Egypt’s Arab Investment Bank has picked technology company Temenos Infinity to provide a range of digital customer experience and grow digital customer base.

Temenos, a banking software company, confirmed entering the contract with AIB in the first week of 2021 with a promise “to power its digital customer experience” for the bank.

The bank says it chose the market-leading capabilities of Temenos Infinity and Temenos Payments to improve performance, drive its digital growth strategy and provide a boost to financial inclusion for ordinary Egyptians.

It is expected that Temenos Infinity will enable Arab Investment Bank to bring new products to market faster, accelerate digital customer onboarding and increase front office efficiency to achieve market-leading cost-income ratio.

It has also undertaken to support the bank’s mission to boost economic development and financial inclusion for 44 million Egyptians, most of them, unbanked.

Arab Investment Bank, one of the fastest growing banks in Egypt, provides personal and business banking products as well as investment and Islamic banking services.

With Temenos Infinity coming on board, the bank says, it has embarked on a digital transformation journey to make banking and financial services easier, faster and more accessible to all Egyptians.

Egypt has an adult population of over 67 million and while over 90 per cent have a mobile phone, only one in three has a bank account and less than six per cent made digital payments in the last year.

Arab Investment Bank already uses Temenos Transact as its core banking technology. Now, with Temenos Infinity, the bank benefits from the leading omnichannel digital banking product covering customer engagement from acquisition to account servicing through to long-term retention.

Using both products, the bank is able to achieve an end-to-end digital banking transformation and market-leading cost-income ratio.

The performance benefits will be seen in higher customer growth, lower cost of marketing, improved front office efficiency with increased straight-through-processing rate and reduced asset write-offs with explainable AI lending.

Temenos Infinity accelerates time-to-market for new products and deliver a seamless, multi-experience digital journey for its customers. With Temenos Infinity, Arab Investment Bank will offer a seamless digital experience to its customers across digital touchpoints for all retail banking products, reducing client onboarding to just minutes.

With its deep analytics, Temenos Infinity the leader in driving customer acquisition and digital banking engagement and enables banks to increase digital revenues five times and cut customer onboarding time by 75 per cent.

Built on a microservices architecture, Temenos Infinity is the most open and agile SaaS product allowing banks to continuously extend and expand their solution for all or portions of the customer lifecycle.

Digital payments are also a strategic growth area for Arab Investment Bank and with Temenos Payments, the bank benefits from a truly comprehensive, universal platform for efficient payment execution and distribution – removing the need for a different system for different payment types.

The bank’s board of directors said in statement after the signing the agreement: “Based on Arab Investment Bank strategy, we chose to partner with Temenos to lead our digital transformation, not only because it has the most advanced technology, but also for its strong presence in the region and its reputation for rapid implementation and time to value.”

The directors said that, with Temenos’ support, AIB was destined to becoming a world-class bank.

“Digital channels are vital to achieving our growth goals and Temenos’ advanced technology will enable us to design and execute a holistic model to support digital acquisition, onboarding, engagement and cross-selling,” read the statement.

Temenos Middle-East and Africa managing director Jean-Paul Mergeai observed, “Internet and mobile banking are key to unlocking economic development and financial inclusion and so Temenos is proud to support Arab Investment Bank in its bold mission to improve access to digital banking services in Egypt.”

Mr Mergeai explained that the suite of Temenos products deployed by Arab Investment Bank will provide an agile platform to move forward at speed with its digital ambitions.

“By making it easier to open a bank account, receive and make digital payments, our technology will help Arab Investment Bank dramatically improve the lives of 44 million Egyptians who currently do not have a bank account,” he said.

• A Tell report/jk