Barko Financial Services (BFS) is a leading microfinance institution in South Africa. By expanding into retail banking, the innovator is planning to shake up the region’s industry, fulfilling the unmet needs of lower-income South African consumers. To underpin its transformation, BFS has deployed Temenos Transact, next-generation core banking to replace legacy core banking systems and Temenos Infinity to elevate its digital banking customer experiences.

The bank went live on Temenos Software-as-a-Service in just 6 months to Deliver Finance Faster. With Temenos Transact and Temenos Infinity, BFS expects to dramatically accelerate customer onboarding, cut loan application and origination times, speed time-to-market for new products and services, and reduce total cost of ownership.

Using Temenos Infinity, BFS was able to reimagine the customer experience, designing and building a new lending service within 12 weeks, completing all customer trials and tests, and launching a final product just three months later. BFS processes more than 125,000 loans per month and with Temenos, its customers can now apply securely via their mobile and receive loan funding almost instantly. BFS can now originate loans for customers via mobile, without them ever having to visit the branch, in just 4½ minutes.

“While the pandemic has increased our service demand, it has impacted our physical operations and customer access to our branches. With Temenos Infinity, we can offer a personalized and digital lending service that gives our customers instant access to the funds they need when they need them without visiting a branch. Our ambition is to provide more banking products. With the Temenos Banking Cloud, we will be able to launch new capabilities faster and provide innovative products which are simple to use and tailored to add value to our target customers.”

Kobus de Wet, Chief Executive Officer