Digital transformation in Uzbekistan: Ipak Yuli Bank

Digital Transformation is currently one of the major investments the management of all financial institutions is focusing on. It is a complex transition of existing processes into “digital” ones in order to bring higher efficiency and sustainable growth.

Digital transformation brings benefits such as maintaining market competitiveness by improving customer experience, saving costs by increasing operational efficiency or creating an additional revenue stream by developing new products and services.

The majority of organizations face numerous challenges on the way to digitalization: from agreeing on the goals for digitalization through choosing proper software and investing in computing power to the need to optimize the processes and train staff. ABC is always ready to help to deal with all of these thanks to our own methodology.

Adastra Business Consulting has been active in the Uzbekistan market since 2019. Since then, we have implemented more than 10 long-term projects for five banks and “Buy Now Pay Later” (BNPL) platforms mostly focusing on Digitalization.

Our presence in Uzbekistan’s market helped us to build a holistic understanding of the local market’s specifics. Using this experience and extensive international know-how, our experts prepared an end-to-end strategy for one of the biggest retail & micro segment banks; the Ipak Yuli Bank.

Adastra Business Consulting in partnership with A+ Solutions, developed a comprehensive IT strategy for the bank. It included a large package of initiatives aimed to increase the bank's efficiency through:

• optimizing and automating processes
• improving IT architecture
• developing new IT systems
• bringing a modern approach to company’s integration processes
• creating a training of existing and new employees

The strategy is expected to bring benefits in the amount of several tens of millions of dollars in next three years. The implementation has started: many projects have already been completed and deployed, including:

1. Optimization of back-office process

Our experts modernized back-office procedures including the loan origination, card processing, card issuance and payroll card program, ATM Network operations, transaction approvals, as well as domestic wire transfers. A new cashier system has been introduced in order to provide fast and convenient customer service.

2. Implementation of a corporate data warehouse and reporting optimization

Our goal is to create a "single source of the truth" for various business units of the bank: from establishing an efficient and fully automated reporting system to expanding data-driven approaches for business analysis. Among milestones, a decision to reject analytical reports in an automated banking system that is not designed to solve such tasks. Special attention was paid to data quality management processes.

3. Creation of a project management office and implementation of a flexible management system for development teams

A project management office team was formed, and project management processes were defined in accordance with international best practices, including a new motivation system. Development teams are gradually transitioning to agile development methodologies. As a result, the transparency of change management processes has been increased, and time-to-market has been shortened.

4. Design and implementation of an Anti-Money Laundering (AML) solution

The result of the project was a new AML strategy, which includes new AML rules and processes, scorecards, blacklists, design, and implementation of an industrial AML solution integrated with the bank's systems.

5. Design, development, and implementation of cashier system

The team has analyzed over 20 cash desk manual paper-based processes and compiled a set of comprehensive functional requirements and graphical user interfaces for the new cash desk system. Apart from design phase, ABC has taken part in system development and testing. The project has a potential to save over 400k EUR annually in labor cost, improve customer experience and reduce operational risk

The satisfaction of Ipak Yuli Bank can be proven by their decision to sign a strategic partnership with Adastra Business Consulting and A+ Solutions to implement remaining digital transformation initiatives of the Digital transformation strategy.

We believe our close partnership will help to strengthen Ipak Yuli’s position as the most innovative bank in Uzbekistan.

See original article in local newspaper.

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