A tier-1 commercial bank in East Africa was averaging nine days from loan application to decision. The customer experience was bad, the cost-per-loan was high, and competitors with cleaner digital flows were taking market share.
Three legacy databases held overlapping records. Four committees touched every loan. A fax machine was still in the documented process. The bank had attempted a previous transformation that stalled in year two. The board wanted a 24-hour decision time, a measurable cost reduction, and a path that would not require ripping out the core.
Six weeks of structured interviews, process discovery and current-state mapping. We documented 47 process variants, eliminated 23, and designed a single target workflow agreed by all four committees.
Rather than replace the core, we built a workflow and decisioning layer on top — Camunda for orchestration, a unified customer view sourced from the three databases via change-data-capture.
12-week pilot in two anchor branches with full instrumentation. Adoption was 92% in week six. Decision time dropped to 31 hours, cost per loan to -34% — enough to commit to scale.
Wave-based deployment over nine months. Senior practitioners in every wave; in-branch champions trained two weeks ahead; daily standups with the regional ops team.
Six-month parallel run with the bank's own engineering team owning the platform. Documented runbook. Quarterly assurance review on adoption and outcomes.
"Arton’s team didn’t show up with slides — they showed up with a process map of our own business that taught us things we didn’t know about ourselves. Eighteen months on, they’re still part of how we operate.
A.K., Group Chief Operating OfficerTier-1 East African Bank
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