Cooperative Bank of Oromia (Coopbank) is an Ethiopian bank established by farmers 19 years ago. Their influence remains strong; more than half of the bank’s shareholders are still farmers, and it remains focused on the MSME farming and agricultural sector, which contributes more than 80% of the national economy, yet suffers from high levels of financial exclusion.
Coopbank is well on its way to fulfilling its goal to be the leading private bank in Ethiopia by 2025. It is already one of the country’s most profitable banks, with a total asset value of more than ETB 139.56 billion, operates 745 branches, employs more than 15,000 people, and has more than 13 million account holders, covering retail, corporate and institutional clients.
Nobody left behind
At the heart of this ambition is a mission to transform livelihoods and empower communities. “That is ultimately what we mean by innovation,” explains Aman Semir, the bank’s Vice President for Technologies and Digital Banking. “It’s really about solving people’s problems.” That mission goes hand-in-hand with a focus on ESG. “We’re early on in that journey, but we’re starting to see the fruits of our framework. For example, around 100 branches are now fully powered by solar and wind energy.”
Half of those branches are containers that have been modified. “We locate them in remote places where there is no electricity, and provide free Internet. For the people around there, they have become more than a bank branch. They are education and community gathering centers.”
Aman calls this the bank’s ‘phygital’ approach
You can’t be a digital bank without first educating people. So we need the physical place where this can happen.In parallel, it is building for the era of open banking. We’ve leveraging open APIs to integrate any third party to our bank.”
Aman Semir, Vice President Technologies and Digital Banking, Cooperative Bank of Oromia
It is this dual track – of both readying for future opportunities while ensuring nobody gets left behind – that marks the Coopbank out.
A great fit from the start
To deliver this strategy, Coopbank turned to Temenos, deploying the core banking platform in 2016. “Everyone had become frustrated by our legacy system. Staff were having to stay in the office until midnight to record the day’s work, such as new accounts opened. You just can’t grow with that sort of inefficiency.”
The bank found its way to Temenos through a combination of Gartner ranking and reviews, RFP response, customer references and personal experiences of employees. It has not looked back. “From the start, Temenos was a really great fit. The past six to seven years have proved that our choice was the right one.”
The evidence for that is everywhere. In that time the bank has grown 19x its customer base from 700,000 to 13.2 million, and is now growing its asset value by 40% year-on-year. Loan portfolio has been growing 50% year-on-year for the past six years, and deposits have increased 39% to 42% in the same timeframe
In the face of sharp growth, the platform has proved scalable and flexible. It can accommodate anything. We can come up with any new product, any configuration or third-party integration, and the system just handles it all.”
Aman Semir, Vice President Technologies and Digital Banking, Cooperative Bank of Oromia
Aman paints a before and after comparison to illustrate his point. “Before Temenos, just to come up with a simple saving product would have taken us a long time. We were forced to go to our vendors and wait for them to configure their systems. But now we can do that in just a few hours, both in-house development and third-party integrations.
Powerful partnerships
For these projects the bank accessed the Temenos certified partner network to source its implementation partners – USI for the initial implementation, Inlaks for the upgrade, and Xpert Digital to enable Temenos digital.
“It’s always been a smooth and fast process – just four months for the initial deployment, and nine months for Temenos digital.” Aman recalls that, back in 2016, the bank chose not to involve Temenos in the implementation, but instead used the model bank configuration. “The scope and flexibility of that template meant when we upgraded, there was nothing to change. It was almost too good to believe!”
Deepening the partnership
As well as upgrading the core banking platform to the latest version in 2023, Coopbank also added Temenos Trade Finance, which it uses to offer interest-free banking to Islamic customers.
With Trade Finance we have enabled automations that have reduced processing times, so that now the back-office runs more smoothly.”
Aman Semir, Vice President Technologies and Digital Banking, Cooperative Bank of Oromia
The bank has also enabled Temenos digital to its suite. “It’s brought customer onboarding to the next level. We’re now able to onboard tens of thousands of customers every day, and give them a world-class experience.” It means the bank can be confident in making ambitious projections. “In the next 12 months we aim to onboard more than five million customers.” Aman explains.
On the way to the top
Aman explains that Temenos has become so important to the bank that the partnership is seen as one of the critical halves of its operation, alongside leadership. As such, it plans to double-down on its investment. “Even though we upgraded the platform just a year ago, we’re already considering adding more modules, so we will probably not wait another three to four years to do another upgrade, but get on with that very, very soon.”
Aman is confident about what that will mean for the bank’s future.
Seven years ago, when we started with Temenos, we were ranked number 11-13 nationally in most banking parameters. Now, we are a number three or four bank, and we are improving all the time. We’re a proud and happy Temenos customer.”
Aman Semir, Vice President Technologies and Digital Banking, Cooperative Bank of Oromia
