Johannesburg, 27 May 2021
As the country’s first fully digital bank, TymeBank’s entire customer experience hinges on an effective back-end. This is where Sourcing’s end-to-end monitoring comes in.
When you are the country’s first fully digital, branchless financial services provider, customer experience (CX) will inevitably be your key differentiator and the most critical aspect of your business. To ensure the CX remains positive at all times, TymeBank works with Sourcing and has implemented a remote monitoring solution designed to identify issues and remediate these before a customer even realises there is a problem.
Bruce Paveley, Head of Technology and Payment Operations at TymeBank, explains that the company has no physical branches but uses kiosks strategically placed at Pick n Pay and Boxer stores. In these stores, individuals can apply for an account and immediately access their personalised debit card - all within five minutes.
No waiting. No paper.
Paveley clarifies: “You bank where you shop and shop where you bank. A TymeBank customer can sign up for an account in-store, withdraw cash at the till and pay no fees. Therefore, our approach is to make banking accessible and easy to use for our customers. Critical to this is our ability to deliver banking service to customers around the clock.
“Our ability to achieve this is rooted in our relationship with Sourcing, along with their unique approach to making this partnership work,” states Paveley.
“Trust has existed between our two organisations from the outset, and they have now integrated with TymeBank to such a degree that we consider Sourcing to be our monitoring capability, rather than a supplier or partner. They are part of our business and fully involved in operations.”
Paveley explains further that as a truly paperless bank, TymeBank's offering is clearly attractive to the market, with the bank drawing over three million customers in just two years of operation. Such exponential growth in customer numbers is a key driver of the need for an effective monitoring solution.
He further states that unlike traditional bricks and mortar banks, TymeBank is agile and reviews its technology architecture every few weeks for updates.
“This has been a journey of discovery for both our companies, with Sourcing helping TymeBank build its monitoring capability from the infrastructure layer out. This began with the monitoring of storage and CPUs and quickly moved up the stack to apps, services and finally to customer experience,” he says.
He comments further: “When you build a bank from the ground up this means that everything is done for the first time. Our monitoring capability can keep up with such a rapid rate of change. We have a view of our infrastructure both cloud and on-premises along with application issues and user experience of our Internet banking and smartphone application.”
“Customer experience is vital for a new bank – especially one that launched after others failed, leading to scepticism of fully digital banks and new players. For TymeBank, our sustained growth is a testament to the success of our brand and offering.
“This success can also be attributed to the effectiveness of our back-end and end-to-end monitoring systems, ensuring customers’ money is immediately available to them, whenever they want access to it.
“It is for this reason that TymeBank works with Sourcing to ensure the business and technology roadmap remains flexible. You could say our partnership operates in sprints, rather than marathons, which is why we have adopted an agile methodology.”
Andrew Turnbull, Managing Director of Sourcing, says: "We are both digital businesses and have a lot in common. We both have the same goal which is to attract and retain clients and offer a service to them that always works. We at Sourcing have been doing this for 20 years now. As a proudly South African company that owns its software, and has deep monitoring expertise, we can adapt and meet the demands of a fully digital bank like TymeBank.”
Paveley adds: “I certainly think the future is bright, especially as TymeBank continually performs enhancements on its systems, which is why it is now moving into the cloud as well. Thus, our latest efforts have involved enabling our monitoring solution to effectively integrate with the native capability of the cloud. This way, Sourcing can provide TymeBank with the benefits of both cloud and on-premises capabilities.”
“I am a brutally honest person and both Andrew and I manage the relationship and the outcomes to achieve what we both want, which is a growing and vibrant relationship. What is key to the relationship is that neither of us has to guess what the other is thinking. We just get on with the job.”
Paveley concludes: “We undertook an extensive evaluation process of monitoring service providers before we selected Sourcing. We can’t do this job cheaper in-house when all the costs are considered.
"Monitoring is not about having access to a tool. It’s about everything you need to get the job done. Sourcing brings people, expertise, intellectual property and automated escalation processes completely integrated into our service desk. And they have proven they can keep up with us as we grow. The quality is good, the price is right and it’s a no brainer to work with Sourcing.”
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