Founded in 1980, Bank ABC has grown into a leading international banking powerhouse serving customers in 25 markets through a network spanning 15 countries across the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, the Americas, and the Far East. The Bank offers corporate and financial institutions comprehensive wholesale banking solutions comprising transaction banking, specialized finance, real estate finance, treasury and financial markets products, as well as Islamic finance services through its subsidiary, Bank ABC Islamic. It also serves individuals through its retail branch network in Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, and Jordan and ila Bank, its digital, mobile-only proposition in Bahrain and Jordan.
Building a unified foundation
In 2023, Bank ABC set out an ambitious growth strategy to drive further efficiency and value creation for stakeholders as MENA’s international bank of the future. While executing this strategy, the Bank identified valuable opportunities to enhance its operating model. The Bank was managing its international footprint under established regional core banking systems, and it was evident that it needed a unified, cloud pathway to drive scalable growth and innovation. Accordingly, the Bank sought to consolidate its banking systems in fifteen markets onto a single, cloud-native platform, creating a stronger foundation for scalable growth, innovation, and operational agility.
This step was particularly significant for ila Bank, Bank ABC’s multi-award-winning, cloud-based digital, mobile-only bank. Since its launch in 2019, ila has rapidly redefined the consumer banking experience in Bahrain through its intuitive banking model. As the business continued to grow, Bank ABC looked to further strengthen the technology foundation supporting ila’s success. To build on its market leadership and continue delivering on ila’s brand promise of “banking that reflects you,” Bank ABC launched a comprehensive modernization program for its core technology stack.
Selecting a technology partner
Following a comprehensive evaluation process Bank ABC selected Temenos. The decision reflected the fit of Temenos’ core banking, payments, digital and data capabilities with the Bank’s requirements, combined with cloud-native hosting on on AWS.
To help execute its program, Bank ABC partnered with Systems Limited, leveraging their deep expertise in cloud-first, multi-country deployments. Bank ABC approached the project with an “adopt, don’t adapt” strategy, prioritizing standard leading practices over customization.
We’re proud to partner with Bank ABC on this landmark transformation. The implementation underscores our shared commitment to driving innovation at speed and scale. With our deep expertise in cloud-first deployments and in supporting digital and multi-country banks globally, this program sets a new benchmark for modern banking. As we extend our collaboration through end-to-end managed services, we enable Bank ABC to focus on growth and delivery of exceptional digital experiences, while we take care of managing the technology.”
Ammara Masood, GM Global, Banking and Financial Services, Systems Limited
The “One Bank Program” blueprint
To manage a footprint of this scale efficiently, Bank ABC, with the support of its partners, mapped out the “One Bank Program“. The foundational objective was to build a standardized technology template once in Bahrain, and then systematically roll it out across the remaining fourteen international locations. By standardizing products and processes globally, the bank eliminated the need for lengthy local implementation cycles in each individual country.
We gave our team a clear mandate to focus on adopting leading practices rather than redesigning products or processes unnecessarily. Temenos is a highly, mature internationally proven core banking platform running in many of the world’s leading financial institutions. Our strategy is to align our ways of working with Temenos, enabling us to benefit from its built-in resilience, standardization, and scalability as we support the Group’s continued growth.”
Ismail Mokhtar, Group Chief Operating Officer, Bank ABC
Phase 1 focused on migrating ila Bank onto the Temenos’ cloud-based platform. Following the technical cutover, Bank ABC publicly announced the successful go-live of its retail account and lending operations on the new platform. The transition delivered immediate operational stability, with limited customer-facing disruption.
Delivering immediate digital value
The deployment has delivered early operational benefits for Bank ABC’s digital capabilities. Following the migration, the bank achieved a 99.9% straight-through processing (STP) rate, reaching peaks of 99.98%. By maintaining a cloud-native delivery model on AWS, ila Bank operates with high structural resilience, insulating the bank’s operations from the hardware recovery concerns of traditional on-premises data centers.
The successful core stabilization cleared the path for the bank to seamlessly transition its retail account structures and accelerate the rollout of its new digital consumer lending capabilities.
This transition enhances our ability to launch new products faster, scale with confidence, and continue redefining consumer banking in the region.”
Mohamed Al Maraj, CEO, ila Bank
Shifting focus to a global future
With the ila Bahrain cloud template successfully operating in production, Bank ABC is advancing its universal core banking transformation roadmap. The platform will serve as the launchpad to transition the bank’s remaining retail and wholesale operations across its fourteen other global hubs, including Bahrain, London, Paris, Milan, Frankfurt, Istanbul, and Singapore onto a single instance of the Temenos platform.
Looking even further ahead, the bank is actively positioning itself to capitalize on artificial intelligence. Bank ABC is currently exploring advanced, intelligent automation workloads, including using AI to automate trade finance document checking and piloting an automated proof of concept for Financial Crime Mitigation (FCM). This comprehensive transformation marks a critical milestone in Bank ABC’s strategic roadmap to become MENA’s international bank of the future.
We partnered successfully with Systems Limited
Systems Limited is a global technology public limited company founded in 1977 with the mission to offer holistic transformations to its clients.
We partnered successfully with AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow.
