Mobiquity: Instilling a culture of innovation
Skilled in the art of blending strategy, creativity, and engineering into effective digital solutions, Mobiquity understands the value of breathing new life into traditional industries. Thierno Diallo, Vice President of Client Delivery, an executive with over 15 years of consulting experience, explained how the company has been helping Kuwait International Bank (KIB) to achieve its goal of becoming a leading Islamic bank.
“If you start looking for innovation around digital, the user experience is one of the first cornerstones that needs to be developed,” he explains. “It has to be seamless, yet Mobiquity started engaging with KIB at a time when physically travelling to learn about the company was not an option because of COVID-19. Nonetheless, our ambition was to bring completely new things to the bank.” From modernising back-end tech architecture to front-end functions like CRM, the company endeavoured to make KIB a fully digital organisation and replace its core systems.
Indeed, Mobiquity’s aim was less about updating KIB as actually rebuilding a new, state-of-the-art bank. That kind of large-scale vision, Diallo states, is what his company specialises at instilling: “Digital transformation requires a modern way of thinking, and, because of legacy bank infrastructure, it’s much easier to start over than build on what came before. It’s less costly, you can act faster, and the result is often more sustainable.” A bank might not intuitively gravitate towards this solution, but this is exactly the reason why partnering with tech-savvy collaborators is so vital. “Banks are banks: they're very good at financial services, but none of them are very good at digital. After all, a bank does this kind of transformation once in a while; Mobiquity enables transformation every day.”
Even though KIB’s transformation took place relatively recently, Diallo is confident that the benefits of this first step in their journey are being felt. Innovation, for example, is a high cultural priority for Mobiquity and it readily imparts this to clients, “‘Innovation’ isn’t so much the technology itself that we are putting out there, but rather the way we think and act.” The company’s position has always been to start from a basis of holistic process automation. Following this methodology, development can happen at all hours of the day and night, ensuring that fresh results are always waiting the next day. “Sometimes we’ll innovate a very small change, such as swiping your hand so that the numbers on your bank account become blurred as a deterrent to theft. Some might call that a gimmick, but at the end of the day you can go to market with these things, leverage them, and attract new customers,” states Diallo.
More than anything, Mobiquity demonstrates that cultural adjustment is just as important to digital transformation as technology. Fintechs, Diallo notes, have taken the industry limelight and traditional banks need to respond to the challenge. Staying competitive is predicated on innovation, and Mobiquity is an expert at convincing others to embrace this way of thinking. Doing so, he argues, will be essential as KIB aspires to become a leading digital Islamic bank. “What KIB wants to achieve with digital technology goes beyond banking; it’s thinking about the additional services that can actually increase customer loyalty. Innovative solutions around wearables and the shift away from physical branches will be where we’ll go together next.”
Read the full Kuwait International Bank report HERE
