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March 18-20 | Barcelona, Spaain

 
CASE STUDY

Tyme Group: Empowering Millions Through Digital Innovation

Product Area

API Management, Identity and Access Management, Integration

Region

Africa

Industry

Financial Services

Highlights

Rapid Growth and Market Expansion:

13 million customers in 5 years.

Reaching the Unbanked:

Account opening takes five minutes (vs. days) and deposits can be made instantly at 40,000 retail till points.

Scalable Technology:

Can efficiently handle millions of transactions while maintaining high performance and security.

Overview

Tyme Group (Tyme) designs and operates digital banks focused on serving the underbanked in emerging markets. Their success story began in 2019 in South Africa, where they’ve amassed 9.5 million customers in just five years. Building on this momentum, in October 2022, the group launched GoTyme, their second bank in the Philippines (with 3.5 million customers), and are now poised to enter Vietnam, a rapidly growing market in Southeast Asia.

The group’s focus on affordability and a streamlined account opening process (taking just five minutes with biometric verification and instant debit card printing) has empowered millions to access financial services for the first time. Tyme's innovative approach, coupled with a customer-centric strategy, allows them to onboard 450,000 new customers per month.

Tyme offers a user-friendly digital platform complemented by physical kiosks within major retail stores like TFG and Pick n Pay in South Africa and Robinsons Retail in the Philippines. Customers can also instantly deposit funds into their accounts at approximately 40,000 retail till points.

Tyme’s vision is to continue expanding its digital banking footprint and unlock the financial potential of millions of people. To support these efforts, the group relies on WSO2 technologies and DeARX Services, a South African IT services company specializing in integration.

quotes

Reflecting on the capability, value and alignment of WSO2 to the Tyme architecture, business, and technical demands makes us appreciate the value of key decisions we took along the journey. Our WSO2 partnership, enabled by the service excellence of DeARX and our internal teams, has been a true enabler of our success story so far"

Dieter Botha

CTO

Tyme Group

Challenge

Tyme's initial challenge was establishing an effective and scalable architecture for a branchless, low-cost digital bank — all while prioritizing trust, reliability, and a customer-centric approach. Key considerations included:

  • Architecture Design: Defining a flexible and scalable architecture to handle future growth.
  • Technology Selection: Choosing reliable and cost-effective technology solutions.
  • Partnership: Selecting trustworthy partners with expertise to implement and support the chosen technologies.

Beyond these, a crucial challenge involved building a solution that could start small but scale rapidly without compromising affordability or performance.

Objectives

Tyme aimed to achieve the following objectives:

  • Scalability: Implement a solution that could accommodate significant growth in customer base and transactions.
  • Cost-Effectiveness: Maintain a low-cost structure to deliver affordable banking services.
  • Performance: Ensure reliable performance with minimal downtime, even during peak periods.
  • Security: Implement robust security measures to protect customer data and transactions.

Solution

At the heart of a digital bank's IT infrastructure lies the integration architecture. It facilitates seamless communication between internal systems, handles file transfers (both internal and external), processes transactions, manages identities (both internal and external), and coordinates interactions between customers, third parties, and the bank's internal systems. Millions of messages flow through this critical component, requiring efficient processing, management, and analysis.

Tyme selected WSO2 as their integration platform, along with DeARX Services as a WSO2 implementation partner. WSO2's products provided critical capabilities:

  • WSO2 API Manager: Securely managed and maintained APIs for internal and external developers, enabling rapid product development and integration with third-party ecosystems.
  • WSO2 Micro Integrator: Facilitated data mediation, message transformation, and file processing, allowing for efficient integration with various internal and external systems. The out-of-the-box ISO8583 connector accelerated compliance with payment standards.
  • WSO2 Identity Server: Managed user authentication, authorization, and session management. The platform offered features like passwordless login, multi-factor authentication, and data privacy protection to ensure robust security.

Tyme's deployment strategy leveraged the flexibility of WSO2 software. They began with an on-premises deployment and later migrated to a serverless environment on AWS, demonstrating the platform's cloud compatibility.

Looking ahead, Tyme plans to embrace open banking by building a developer-friendly ecosystem with well-documented APIs. This will allow third-party providers to integrate with their services and create embedded finance solutions. Additionally, they aim to streamline the customer experience by simplifying identity management and login processes while maintaining security. They're also expanding into business banking by leveraging WSO2 to integrate their offerings with business customer workflows.

Results

  • Scalable Infrastructure: WSO2 supports Tyme's multi-country expansion by enabling a hybrid cloud approach with a single source codebase across operations
  • API Management: WSO2's API Gateway handles all incoming and outgoing traffic, ensuring consistent and reliable performance for enhanced customer experiences.
  • Customer Identity Management: WSO2's system streamlines account opening and access, fostering trust through robust security measures.
  • Empowered Feature Teams: WSO2 reduces technical complexity for development teams, allowing them to focus on innovation and customer needs.
  • Open Banking and Embedded Finance Potential: WSO2 lays the foundation for future integration with third-party services and embedded finance solutions.

Tyme's success story highlights the importance of a well-designed architecture, strategic technology selection, and strong partnerships. WSO2's integration platform provided Tyme with the necessary scalability, cost-effectiveness, and security to achieve its goals. Looking ahead, Tyme can continue to leverage WSO2's capabilities to support its ongoing growth and innovation in the digital banking space.

For a deeper dive into how Tyme was able to empower millions through digital innovation, we encourage you to watch Dieter Botha (CTO, Tyme Group) speak at WSO2Con 2024.

Partner

DeARX Services

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