Case study · Ethiopia
Digital customer onboarding at national retail-banking scale.
Bank of Abyssinia needed to onboard retail customers across Ethiopia with biometric capture and document verification, integrated to the core banking system. Our team built the capture apps and the adjudication middleware behind them.
3+ yearsIn production for
MillionsCustomer base supported
EthiopiaNational retail-banking onboarding
How it fits together
From a branch tablet to the customer of record.
The branch captures; the middleware adjudicates; the core banking system holds the customer. The difficult part is the layer in the middle, and that is the layer we built.
Front line
Branch tablet
Built by the team
Adjudication middleware
System of record
Core banking system
What we built
Capture at the branch, adjudication behind it.
Retail onboarding fails on the edge cases — a poor fingerprint, a worn document, an intermittent branch connection. The middleware is where those are handled.
Tablet-based capture
- Biometric capture at the branch counter, on hardware branch staff can actually operate
- Document capture with OCR extraction
Adjudication middleware
- Verification logic and exception handling between capture and the core
- Integration to the core banking system, so the customer record is created once and correctly
- Running in production for over three years
Why the middleware matters. Capture apps are the visible part. What determines whether a national onboarding programme works is what happens to the records that do not cleanly pass — and whether the core banking system ever sees a bad one.
Onboarding customers at scale?
We have run it in production for a national retail bank for over three years.