Early mover advantages
Bank built from scratch in under 12 months
A customer-centric bank
A best-of-breed approach to features and functions
A bank that is infinitely scalable and future proof
A SaaS deployment that runs on AWS cloud
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Romania has an avid appetite for digital financial products. Online banking is flourishing and 59% of the population use contactless payments.https://www.statista.com/statistics/1114099/romania-payment-methods-during-covid-19/
- With the help of GFT and Engine by Starling, Salt Bank was built from the ground up as Romania’s first native digital neobank.
- Salt's mission is clear, the brand name, when translated means 'Leap' - an action they are wanting customers to take as they live up to their name to provide a bright new future for banking in Romania and the European Union.
Challenge
Build a digital bank from scratch in under a year
Salt Bank is a subsidiary of Banca Transylvania, the largest bank in Southeastern Europe. As a neobank challenging the market, Salt wished to disrupt and usher in a new era with a digital, app-first bank that offered a great customer experience. To achieve this it would combine the innovation and agility of modern fintech with the safety and security of a regulated bank.
With a potential market of up to 20 million customers in Romania, Salt Bank needed to bring its vision to life, of building an appealing new bank from scratch in order to attract a wide range of new customers. Having completed a comprehensive business plan, it needed experienced partners who could accelerate progress, mitigate risk, and deliver a feature rich digital bank. The Salt team also shared GFT’s strategic view of the banking technology market; that banks can rapidly assemble capabilities from industry platforms, delivered “as-a-service”, to enable exceptional customer outcomes.
Having watched the rapid growth of the UK’s digital banking market, Salt Bank chose Engine by Starling as its core banking platform. Engine had proven itself in the UK as the technology powering Starling Bank’s innovation-led success; however, the platform would need work to meet the specific requirements of the Romanian market. And Salt Bank faced a deadline to launch the new bank within a year.
To meet its ambitious timetable, Salt Bank needed a confident, experienced technology partner to drive the project forward at pace. GFT had the right credentials, having built several successful digital banks from scratch worldwide, encompassing: industry knowledge, platform integration skills, and the expertise to help Salt Bank design the new operations that would run the bank once launched.
“We began with a vision to transform how people bank in Romania, but we needed an able partner to bring our big idea to life.”
Engagement
A feature-rich bank on the cloud
GFT developed, together with Salt Bank, a detailed functional specification and implementation plan to launch the new bank within 12 months – an unprecedented timescale. With an ambition to acquire tens of thousands of customers within a year and a route to millions in the medium term, customer experience, security and scalability were all crucial considerations for the project.
To encourage early adoption, Salt Bank encouraged new customers to register their interest one months in advance of the official launch, in a pre-enrolment campaign. The first wave of registered customers would be entitled to join as ‘founders’, with early access to onboarding and other benefits. As a demonstration of confidence in the delivery schedule, Salt Bank CEO Gabriela Nistor was the first customer to register in October 2023.
In line with the ambition to accelerate delivery using pre-built industry solutions, Salt Bank chose to run the new bank as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployment on a private cloud using AWS tooling throughout. GFT’s industry expertise, integration capabilities and cloud security knowledge were vital. GFT were engaged to lead the development, building a bespoke cloud platform and orchestrating the Salt Bank ecosystem by integrating third parties, which included Engine’s core platform and processing capabilities plus other specialised providers.
GFT designed and built the mobile app-based customer experience to reflect the Salt Bank brand and its promise to make digital banking exciting, convenient and fast. The new app was able to utilise best practice from the industry-leading Starling Bank in the UK. It was designed to harness the latest in document and face recognition techniques to make onboarding easy, quick and secure, creating a great first impression, thereby reducing the likelihood of aborted applications.
Another unique attraction of the Salt Bank proposition was that, unlike many digital newcomers, it was able to offer fully functional multicurrency at launch. Although the Engine core platform provides an API-enabled and full service bank, significant work was required to enable a seamless first-time deployment outside of Starling Bank’s home market (UK).
“We wanted to follow Engine’s achievement with Starling Bank in the UK, but we needed GFT’s technology and practical expertise to replicate that success in Romania.”
Benefit
Excellence rewarded – 100,000 new customers onboarded in 10 days!
Salt Bank was launched just a year after the project began. The new retail bank debuted with: a current account paying 3% interest (for transactors above a certain limit), digital wallet compatibility, mixed term deposits, a multicurrency card (supporting 17 different currencies), and a savings account.
By all measures, Salt Bank’s launch has been an outstanding success. The aim to onboard 230,000 customers by the end of 2024 was almost achieved within a month of launch, with the bank reaching 200,000 new customers after just one month. Customers appreciate the simplicity and speed of onboarding, with an average time of less than seven minutes to create a live account. Following the launch, there was an unprecedented number of new customers signing up each day, and the systems managed the process faultlessly. Salt Bank set an objective at launch of 1 million customers within three years of operation, but early signs are that they are likely to reach this business case milestone far sooner.
Salt Bank’s success is a triumph of collaboration in the digital age, demonstrating the accretion potential of successfully integrating a number of leading industry platform solutions. GFT harnessed its global delivery model across 18 nationalities to maintain momentum on a highly complex and diverse build and deployment, demonstrating the deep expertise necessary to create a truly integrated and innovative new bank.
“Salt Bank’s success shows that digital is a smarter, simpler way to bank. But success is a journey, and we will continue to deliver innovations that improve the lives of people in Romania.”
GFT continues to support Salt Bank, but the joint strategy is for the bank to become self-sufficient in the medium term. To help achieve this, GFT has helped recruit, onboard and train a Salt Bank team of 50 specialists to manage its new infrastructure. Over time, GFT will play a supporting role as the bank takes on more of the future development work itself. GFT also put in place robust, best practice governance for future technical projects, plus ‘control gates’ for new developments being released into production.
GFT ensures that all partners continue to collaborate on new developments, in order to attract and retain more customers. Digital lending, small business accounts and investment products are all under consideration, and Salt Bank is open to any new banking service that can help improve their customers’ financial wellbeing.
Although Salt Bank wanted to deliver a new ‘digital first’ bank for Romania with built-in self-serve experiences, the team also understood that a key part of the Starling Bank ethos is the 24/7 human support available through its dedicated customer support function. Salt Bank’s pledge to place its customers at the heart of all that it does means they have adopted this same approach.
“Our highly capable platform was effectively integrated by GFT for the Romanian market, delivering feature-rich and highly personalisable banking products that can equally be deployed around the world to attract impressive customer volumes. GFT’s specialist team successfully delivered the implementation and they see the significant potential of our platform.”
