TOP Bank in MENA
January 15, 2025
About the Customer
One of MENA's largest banks is a leading private deposit bank providing comprehensive services across corporate, commercial, SME, retail, and private banking segments. The institution has established itself as a digital excellence leader, with strong acquisition and sales performance through digital channels 75% of new customer acquisition occurs through digital onboarding.
The bank has received significant recognition for its digital transformation achievements, being named "Best Bank for Customer Experience in CEE" by Euromoney in 2025.
The bank operates an extensive physical and digital infrastructure including 688 branches, 6,250+ ATMs, and 810K+ POS terminals, supported by approximately 12,900 employees.
Customer Challenge
The bank faced bottlenecks in corporate customer onboarding. The Know Your Business (KYB) verification process was severely fragmented, requiring extensive documentation including tax certificates, trade registry documents, signature circulars, and notarization papers. Multiple verification steps and handoffs between teams extended processing times significantly.
The manual approach created operational risks. Documents were collected through email and various portals, with staff manually reviewing PDF files and cross-referencing official records and sanctions lists through separate systems. Tool fragmentation was a major issue; OCR, RPA, and different verification services were attempted to be integrated, but decision trails and evidence remained scattered across Excel files and ticketing systems.
The bank struggled to generate comprehensive audit packages with complete evidence sets (documents, timestamps, decision logs) in a centralized location, creating potential regulatory concerns.
The trigger for transformation came from converging pressures: new product launches and regional expansion increased application volumes while existing processes created bottlenecks extending up to 2 days. Internal audit and compliance teams demanded improvements in evidence quality and decision consistency.
Upsonic Solution
To address these challenges, the bank implemented Upsonic's comprehensive Onboarding Agent, which transforms the entire corporate customer verification workflow through intelligent automation. The solution provides "Compliance You Can Prove" capabilities by automatically processing tax, registry, identity, and notarization documents while extracting UBO structures and signatory authorities including scope and duration limitations.
The system performs automatic cross-validation against official government institutions and sanctions APIs, generating audit-ready evidence packages for every decision. This end-to-end approach ensures complete traceability and consistent decision-making across all corporate applications.
The platform delivers "Minutes-to-Activation Speed" through automated triage, completeness checking, deduplication, risk scoring, and intelligent routing that enables approval workflows within minutes rather than days. The solution provides "Scale Without Headcount" escalation management from a single dashboard, with pre-built integrations, automatic retry mechanisms, and data localization options.
The integration was completed within weeks using predefined templates and evidence packages, providing teams with unified visibility and control. Bank-specific exceptions and risk policies are jointly modeled and updated flexibly to accommodate evolving requirements.
Results and Benefits
The implementation has fundamentally transformed the bank's corporate onboarding capabilities, reinforcing its position as a digital leader while dramatically improving operational efficiency. The most significant achievement is the reduction in corporate onboarding time from approximately 2 days to under 5 minutes.
The "Compliance You Can Prove" capability has standardized audit-ready evidence package generation for every case, including documents, timestamps, and decision logs.
Operational efficiency has improved dramatically through reduced manual controls and inter-team handoffs. The system focuses human-in-the-loop intervention only on edge cases, allowing staff to concentrate on high-value activities rather than routine document processing.
This scalability has been crucial for supporting new product launches and regional expansion initiatives.