Digital Bank - Hourly Settlement of Transactions

About the Digital Bank

A leading digital bank based in Nigeria is dedicated to simplifying banking and empowering customers to take control of their finances. By offering tools to split, schedule, send, receive, and track payments, the bank equips users with resources for better transaction management and a deeper understanding of their spending habits.

Customer experience is at the heart of the bank's mission, driving innovation and continuous improvement. Their adoption of SolveXia reflects a commitment to pioneering financial solutions and maintaining a strong customer-first approach.

The Challenge

As the digital bank continues to scale, increased demands were placed on the back office operations to ensure that each transaction across the payment lifecycle is tracked, managed and accounted for.

The transfer of payment data typically occurs through HTTP, flat files via SFTP, and batch processing. Despite the reliability of these methods, occasional challenges arise in data exchange between parties. To address this, the team sought a reconciliation strategy capable of detecting duplicate data issues to ensure the intended movement of funds and averting adverse financial outcomes such as delayed or incorrect customer payments.

Additionally, they needed to ensure the traceability and auditability of transactions, as their bank partners, processors and regulators routinely ask for detailed information concerning transaction data and customer account balances.

Solution

The bank chose SolveXia to automate their bank reconciliation process. The solution automatically matches all inward and outward transactions processed by the digital bank with data supplied by the Nigerian Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), the primary facilitator of interoperability and aggregation in Nigeria’s payment industry.

NIBSS provides settlement files at several specified intra-day windows. These are text files composed of header sections and data sections. The SolveXia process collates, validates, and transforms these files into a table of transactions for the day, which is then reconciled against the transactions from the bank's eWallet system.

The SolveXia system can keep track of transactions across different reconciliation runs to cope with any transactions affected by time lags, for example, if settled on T+1.

For every reconciliation run, a report is produced showing the reconciliation status. This includes summary data and transactional data enabling the operator to investigate any failed transactions.

Key Results and Outcomes

Using SolveXia, the digital bank reconciles over 8,000 transactions daily, resulting in a monthly saving of over 75 hours of manual effort. The solution allows for hourly settlement of all transactions and ensures flexibility to accommodate changes in the frequency and format of data files provided by NIBBS. Additionally, the solution provides the assurance regulators require that all digital transactions balance and has enhanced both traceability and auditability.

Key Metrics

• 75 hours of manual effort saved each month
• Effortless reconciliation of over 8,000 transactions daily