Operationalizing Banque Misr Digital Factory

About the Project

Banque Misr is the second largest commercial bank in Egypt, and was looking to modernize it’s business loan offerings. Micro, Small, and Medium sized businesses in the country often faced months of waiting before their loans were approved and disbursed, which predictably caused a lot of difficulty in financial planning and growing one’s business. The Bank embarked on an ambitious project to bring the time to disbursal down to 5 working days.

I was the lead designer, managing a team of 12+ designers both onsite and remote, working in Agile scrum. I shepherded the digital transformation of the commercial banking offerings by the Bank with it’s first product, the Micro and Small Loans.

How we did it:

1. The Vision framing exercise

This consisted of conducting stakeholder interviews and research to validate assumptions, map the existing user experience with service blueprints, and uncover pain points for both the customers and stakeholders, and created customer personas. We also benchmarked global standards for best practices and inspiration for what we wanted in our product. The vision framing activities culminated in a day long cross-department workshop with all key bank executives, followed by a quick prototype to demonstrate the outcomes of the workshop.

2. Inception phase

During the Inception phase, we first constructed a very detailed service blueprint for the product we wanted to build. This was then translated into a new, more detailed prototype with a brand new visual design language. This 2 month long exercise helps the product team and the organisation work out the details of operations, implementation, compliance and legal considerations, technical feasibility and also focus on the product-market fit through continuous testing.

3. The Product Sprints

These lasted about 5 months, with 2 week sprints that focused on the delivery of prioritised features. An Agile 101 training was conducted and its learnings were incorporated to run regular sprint ceremonies such as the sprint planning, feature groomings, demo days, and retrospectives. As the product development neared completion, we also continued usability testing and were able to quickly pivot in the face of changing financial regulations in the country. We were also able to optimize the backoffice processes with a new tool and create training modules for the bank employees to have a smooth transition to the new way of processing loans once the product was released.

4. Launch

The product went live with a 5 days time to disbursal, and has been well received by the bank’s customers in the micro, small, and medium business segments.

The platform was launched in Sept 2020 and in the very next year was awarded the best bank for SMEs in Egypt in 2021 and MSMEs contributed to 27% share of the bank’s total loan book was projected to grow to 50% in 5 years.

Key learnings from the project:

👍Liaison with C-suite executives for project updates and participating in strategy discussions
👍 Developed a successful framework for planning and execution of strategy and product ideation with stakeholders
👍 Created processes for effective people management and program management on large scale Agile development projects