IndustriesBanking
Your core is not going to change. What you offer on top of it can.
Your core does what it does and it is not moving, and nobody sensible is asking it to. The trouble is that every new thing you want to offer ends up as a project against it. A new product, a new channel, a partner who wants to connect. Each one needs a change window and a place in the queue, so the answer to most good ideas becomes next year.
We build the services that sit next to your core and speak to it. The core carries on doing its job. The new service runs beside it, reads what it needs and writes back what it should, and your customers see something new without anybody touching the ledger.
How long would it take you to put a new product in front of customers today, and how much of that wait is the core?
What usually breaks
Not a list of features missing. A list of the places the work actually falls over, in this sector, in this market.
- 01
Every new idea turns into a core project
It does not matter how small the idea is. If it touches the core it joins the same queue as everything else, and the queue is measured in quarters.
- 02
The core is the bottleneck for things that are not the core
A landing page, a partner feed, a new form. None of these are ledger work, and all of them wait behind ledger work.
- 03
Onboarding is a paper queue
Documents collected, scanned and checked by somebody who is also doing three other jobs. The customer waits, and a share of them do not come back.
- 04
The regulatory return is assembled
Built out of exports and spreadsheets by hand, which makes it slow to produce and very hard to trace back when a number is questioned.
What we build
What we bring to a bank is engineering around the core it already runs. In practice it is these five things.
- 01
New services that speak to your core
A product built beside the core, reading and writing only what it needs. We are doing exactly this with insurance right now: a customer buys cover through the bank, and the policy, the payment and the record all reach the right places without the core being rebuilt.
- 02
Onboarding and identity checks
Documents captured and read, identity verified, risk scored and the review queue managed, with each check recorded so the file can be defended later.
- 03
Agent and partner portals
Agents, merchants and partners transacting and seeing their own position, each with their own reconciliation.
- 04
The internal side of the bank
Procurement, payment requests, approvals, staff, assets and projects, with limits, delegation and a record at the end of each one. This is the part of a bank still running on email.
- 05
Assistants and document reading
For the questions that fill a call centre and the paperwork that fills a back office, with a hard line at anything involving a commitment, a price or a liability.
What it has to live with
Nothing here runs on its own. These are the systems your business already answers to, and a system that ignores them is a system somebody has to work around.
- 01
Your core banking system
Through its own interfaces, on its own terms. We work with your core vendor and inside your change process, and the ledger stays where it is.
- 02
TIPS and TISS
The Bank of Tanzania's instant payment system, which runs around the clock and connects banks and mobile money operators to each other, and the interbank settlement system behind high value transfers. We build to both, working from the scheme documentation your side holds.
- 03
Mobile money
Where a very large share of retail money in this market actually moves, and where the reconciliation problem usually lives.
- 04
NIDA and BRELA
Identity verification for individuals and company checks for business customers, during onboarding, with a defined route for anybody who cannot be verified electronically. In this market that is a real and sizeable group.
What changes
The reason to do any of it, in the language of the person signing for it.
- A new product in front of customers in weeks, without a core project behind it
- Changes at the edge that do not wait for a change window in the middle
- Reconciliation that runs on its own, with only the breaks reaching a person
- A member of staff can finish onboarding a customer while they are still in front of them
- Regulatory returns read straight out of the book
- One answer to a customer's question, whichever channel they asked it on
Where this usually starts
Most companies in this sector begin with one of these and add the rest later.
- Business systems (ERP)One system your company runs on, built around the way it already works.
- AIAnswers around the clock, and the paperwork read for you.
- AutomationThe repetitive work that eats a week, done without anyone doing it.
- Data analysis and reportingThe patterns your day-to-day numbers hide, and what to do about each one.
Questions you probably have
The ones we are actually asked, answered the way we answer them on a call.
- Would you touch our core?
- Not unless you ask us to, and we would want a strong reason. Everything here sits around the core and speaks to it through its own interfaces. That is deliberate: the fastest way to make a bank slower is to put its ledger in scope.
- Can you work alongside our existing vendors?
- Yes, and it is usually the job itself. A bank of any size has a core vendor, a card vendor, a channels vendor and several others. Most of the value in what we do is in making them agree with each other.
- Do you have banking experience?
- CRDB Bank is a client. That work showed us how a bank of that size actually runs a project: the reviews, the approvals, the security requirements and the pace of it. That is most of what makes working with a bank different from working with anybody else.
- How do you handle security, and our data?
- Labedan is a Registered Data Processor with the Personal Data Protection Commission of Tanzania. Beyond that, your own standards govern: we work inside your security review, your environments and your change process.
- Can we see an audit trail on everything?
- Yes. Every record carries who did what and when, built in from the start. In this sector it is a precondition.
- We are not a bank. We are a fintech, or a microfinance institution.
- Most of this applies unchanged. The problem of getting a new service live, the onboarding problem and the reconciliation problem are the same shape. The licence and the reporting obligations differ, and those are configuration.