Winning in the customer era
EcoBank, an independent pan-African banking group, has recently implemented a full-stack observability platform across 33 African countries from TouchForce to drive customer experience. We spoke to the Bank’s regional CIO for Anglophone Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa, Charles Asamoah Assah and Syed Shahan, Founder of TouchForce, to garner insights into this transformative journey.
What made TouchForce choose EcoBank over 100 plus banks in Africa to instrument digital transformation?
Syed: A visionary may see, but a leader decides. The vision of Emmanuel Ikazoboh, Chairman of EcoBank, was very clear – the group needed to significantly improve customer experience and also be benchmarked against the best in class.
EcoBank is a beehive of visionaries and leaders who are futuristic in their mission. Charles architected the use of an APM from a customer experience perspective. Charles’s commitment to accelerate seamless customer experience is futuristic. TouchForce was fortunate to create a platform with these visionaries over a period of six months to bring proof of value. Once we were able to extract data and insights from the solution that empowered EcoBank, Charles visualised its impact on their 25 million customers instantly and made the decision.
What is the value an APM solution brings to EcoBank?
Syed: I read about the Group CEO Ade Ayeyemi’s mission, which stated:“In this new age of banking, our strategy was formulated to ensure that EcoBank becomes the pan-African bank of the future. To attain this goal, we must focus intensely upon our digital banking transformation journey so that we could survive the onslaught of disruptive technology.”
Benchmarking a solution to match their vision was our goal. EcoBank has several applications across its architecture that interact at an incredible pace to provide a seamless banking experience to its customers. TouchForce’s mission was to bring a single pane end-to-end observability across their technology stack. We achieved this at a breakneck pace working with Charles and his team at EcoBank. We shifted the process to a future state and adopted an OODA loop framework. As a result, EcoBank has transformed into a state of Zero Click observability in real-time.
Can you name some of the pain points addressed during this journey?
Syed: We stumbled upon challenges that were generic in the banking industry. Charles looked at the challenges as ‘Tech Dystopia’ using a proactive approach. Tracing an issue when multiple services are in progress in real-time was key. Also, reducing the target response time to less than three seconds from minutes, and the root cause analysis time from days to a couple of minutes was crucial to deliver a better customer experience. Another key objective was to provide value to DevOps, Infra, and the executive team with predictive AI-powered dashboards in line with the vision of the leaders of EcoBank.
Charles, can you describe the journey with TouchForce as the regional CIO of the Bank?
Charles: The journey with TouchForce was insightful and eye-opening. We were faced with several customer challenges, which made us play catchup with the customers. We needed to be ahead of the game and improve our user experience across all channels. From the initial demonstration of the tool and the value addition that the user experience tool brings, we knew that we had chosen the right partner from the start. Their customer engagement and support teams were unprecedented and always available to assist throughout the deployment and post-deployment phases. We know we have made the right choice in improving our customer experience.
