Fragmented architecture will kill your bank

When financial systems operate in fragments, risk travels faster than information—discover why incremental updates are no longer enough to save your bank.

About the Bank :

AFC Commercial Bank is a prominent, licensed commercial bank in Zimbabwe, regulated under the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ). As a key entity within the government- owned AFC Holdings (formed in 2021 by amalgamating four institutions for enhanced synergy), the bank plays a crucial role in supporting the agricultural sector while offering comprehensive banking services to the wider economy.

The conventional view of digital transformation, treating it as a project with a finite “Go-Live” date, is fundamentally flawed. Across the global financial system, institutions operate in an environment where liquidity, data, identity, and risk flow in real time. For us at AFC Commercial Bank, we realised that our relevance would be defined by the speed and coherence of our digital architecture, not just our branch network.

The foundational systems many of us relied on were built for a different era, defined by batch windows, siloed departmental functions, and slow, clearly separated operational lanes. A deeper look at our banking architecture exposed a tension: the Zimbabwean market was operating at real-time speed, while our infrastructure was struggling with batch-time logic. Our strategic imperative was to transform our systems to realize our ambition of becoming ‘the bank of the future’ and bringing banking a lot closer to most of our customers.

The architecture burden of fragmentation

The root cause of stagnation for many banks is architectural fragmentation. Before our transformation, our systems exhibited classic vulnerabilities: key functions like core banking, loan origination, and digital channels operated in silos, while risk and inefficiency directly impacted our ability to serve clients.

This fragmentation presented multiple barriers to competitive operation at AFC:

• Operational friction: The processes required to launch new products were slow and cumbersome, directly undermining our strategic drive for a quick go-to-market (GTM) and achieving necessary cost effectiveness
• Data incoherence: Customer data, spread across multiple ledgers, made it difficult for our teams to have a 360 degree view of the customer’s portfolio, generate reliable insights or hold meaningful discussions with clients
• Customer experience gaps: The fractured environment limited our ability to deliver on the promise of anytime & anywhere banking, hindering our ability to serve clients across all segments

Fragmentation was once a manageable inconvenience; for our bank in the current economy, it is a systemic barrier to relevance.

Incremental modernisation does not work for everyone

We understood that spending years on incremental modernization—refreshing databases, layering APIs, and enhancing user interfaces—would not suffice. Our insight confirmed that incremental modernization does not resolve foundational architectural challenges:

• Siloed systems cannot be stitched into a coherent customer fabric.
• End-of-day processes cannot be converted into event-driven intelligence.
• Manual interventions cannot be eliminated by simply adding new front-end features.

We realized that chasing the digital frontier required a shift from layering to a complete architectural overhaul. This necessitated adopting the intelligent core.

The Intelligent Core: An operating philosophy

Our transformation was driven by the realization that achieving our vision required an intelligent core—a system designed around the principles of continuous service and unified intelligence. This philosophy dictates that:

• Processing is real-time, not periodic
• Data is unified, ensuring seamless customer journeys
• Services are decomposed (modular), not monolithic

The implementation of a modular core solution was the essential architectural condition that enabled our agility and allowed us to roll out solutions much faster. Intellect Design Arena, as our transformation partner, provided the engine for our ongoing evolution and supported this journey with their global expertise.

The impact: Metrics of continuous relevance

The true measure of this shift is its impact on our market and our business. The intelligent core allows AFC Commercial Bank to sense, interpret, and act at the speed of the modern economy:

Impacto empresarial	Transformation Metric
Market Adoption	Up to 65% revenue is generated digitally, validating the market’s high appetite for our modern channels.
Customer Loyalty	We recorded higher NPS, a direct outcome of providing seamless operations and ease of access.
Operational Empowerment	The system is easy to operate, freeing up our staff’s time for value-added activities—a testament to efficient design.
Product Agility	The modularity allows us to launch new products quickly, sustaining our competitive edge.

Table : AFC Bank’s business transformation powered by Intellect

Key considerations: Governance and Sustaining the Momentum

Success of this magnitude demands rigorous commitment beyond the technology investment. Our journey was governed by three foundational prerequisites:

• Establish clear business benefits: Defining tangible outcomes (like digital revenue share) from the start
• Galvanise internal leadership & board: Securing the mandate for change was sustained institutionally across our bank
  
  
• Establish clear governance: Maintaining disciplined oversight throughout the multi-year journey

Architectural resilience requires a commitment to continuous support. Intellect ensures stability throughout the go-live process to maintain the trust and experience of our customers and our team.

Closing reflection: Transformation is the irreducible constant

The new mandate for banks is simple: stop building for the transaction and start building for the journey—creating systems that evolve at the pace of customer expectation.

The transformation journey is not a one-off project; it is a perpetual state of evolution for AFC Commercial Bank. We are continuously evaluating and refining our internal processes with the view to introducing additional solutions that further enhance the level of ease of doing business for our clients.

For the industry, the lesson from our experience is clear: Transformation helps organizations stay relevant. Fragmented architectures are incompatible with real-time finance. The intelligent core is the institutional foundation for growth, digital innovation, and competitive resilience. We believe that banks that embrace this architectural shift, albeit with the right transformation partner, will secure their place as relevant players in the next decade of finance.