​In the increasingly competitive banking market, it is vital to offer innovative products to attract new customers and boost loyalty, to differentiate and drive operational efficiencies. Digital Transformation is rapidly being adopted by the financial sector as a means to accelerate the launch of new innovative digital, personalized and profitable banking services. 

Launching innovative and cost-effective digital banking services will not only help retain increasingly demanding consumers, but more importantly expand access to those currently unbanked 

In many developing countries, such as Egypt, a large proportion of the population is still not served by the traditional banking system. 

Currently, the principal barriers to adoption of financial services are a lack of consumer awareness of the services currently available and their benefits, and the relatively high cost of delivering banking services through traditional channels, which makes them extremely expensive. 

Addressing such challenges, the Commercial International Bank-Egypt (CIB) and Orange Business Services’ Cairo-based Digital Lab signed recently an innovation partnership that focuses on supporting and nurturing the creation of a new Fin-Tech ecosystem in Egypt, led by young entrepreneurs and startups, to develop innovation solutions that will increase access to more banking and financial services for more Egyptians.

The Digital Lab, a rising star in Egypt’s digital ecosystem, has a talented and motivated young workforce (average age around 25), and holds an excellent track record of digital innovation, providing Egyptian and increasingly regional enterprise customers with high-value innovation and agile development capabilities as part of enterprises’ digital transformation strategies. 

CIB-Egypt is one of the leading private sector bank in Egypt and the best bank in the Emerging Markets, offering a comprehensive and wide range of financial products and services to its clients, who include enterprises and institutions of all sizes, high-net-worth (HNW) inpiduals and retail customers. CIB’s Digital Banking strategy does not only focus on providing a distinctive bouquet of digital banking services and unique banking experience to customers, but it also supports the promising Fin-Tech entrepreneurs, who will be significantly contributing to the economic development and financial inclusion, as a result of integrating the financial solutions with technology.

Establishing this ecosystem should encourage entrepreneurship in the country, resulting in Fin-Tech start-ups that can contribute to financial inclusion and job creation. This could also help establish Egypt as the Fin-Tech start-up hub in the region.

Key areas being addressed in the collaboration to increase financial inclusion will include, and not limited to, low-cost mobile banking solutions for under banked and unbanked population, and new innovative banking solutions for the banked population. The partnership focuses also on increasing the KYC (Know Your Customer) by offering authentication and validation solutions (e.g. biometrics and block-chain) to avoid fraud and identity theft, in addition to the IT agility by providing SAAS digital banking solutions and next generation network strategies.

The FinTech partnership is part of both Orange Business Services and CIB’s Digital Transformation strategy.