Transforming digital banking in Libya with Business Process Analysis

Founded in 1997, Assaray Trade & Investment Bank (ATIB) is a banking institution operating in Libya. Its services are dedicated to the corporate and retail sectors. With more than 200 employees, it has branches in Libya’s three major cities of Tripoli, Benghazi and Misrata, and is planning to expand digitally to cover the whole country.

In addition to navigating political and economic challenges, ATIB took the opportunity to update the Core Banking System (CBS), improving compatibility with newer systems. By modernizing the CBS, ATIB ensures customers have 24/7 online access to their services, regardless of the conditions. Furthermore, 90% of ATIB’s customers expressed a desire for a fully digital offering.

ATIB embarked on the digitalization journey by migrating to Temenos Transact system. As a result, many of its existing processes had been identified as in need of updating. At the time, process modeling was carried out manually and changes were time-consuming. Each process existed in isolation, and there was no visibility into how they were interconnected, and a centralized system was needed to control process design, change management, risk & compliance, and automation—each aligned to ATIB’s strategy.

The following year, ATIB adopted ARIS, the leading Business Process Management & Analysis solution from Software AG. As its primary objective was to better serve customers, the bank began by mapping its front office processes. Today, 130 customer-focused processes have been mapped, including onboarding, opening accounts, and issuing cards.

The next priority was the back office, where ARIS was used to map processes central to the functioning of the operations and settlement teams. The aim was to further strengthen the bank’s capacity to respond to its customers and provide them with tailored solutions.

In total, ATIB has now mapped more than 220 processes, and it is moving on to mapping its third priority: the support functions, including Legal and Control processes.

“The deployment of ARIS went very smoothly,” says Wissam S Mohammed, Continuous Improvement Manager at ATIB. “We were particularly grateful for the support of our partners, Pragma Consult Tunis and Spirit Hellas SA Greece,” he says. “Their experience and flexibility made a big difference, and helped us structure ARIS aligned to modeling best practices and the reality of our business.”

“ARIS had an immediate impact on our business,” says Wissam S Mohammed, Continuous Improvement Manager at ATIB. “It’s given us exceptional clarity on our processes and made us more rigorous in how we structure them. That’s allowed us to optimize processes, rapidly update them, and make the most of our digital transformation. The positive outcomes are numerous.”

• For ATIB, one of the key operational objectives was to facilitate integration with third-party systems. Previously, the lack of process transparency made integration challenging. However, with the implementation of ARIS, this has significantly improved. Today, ATIB has been able to integrate its core banking system with the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) system, enabling all transfers to pass directly via CBL. Similarly, ATIB is changing the card management system used by Mastercard. “We’ve found it so much easier to update shared processes thanks to ARIS” says Rim B Atallah, Change Management Consultant at ATIB.
• ARIS has also given rise to “a more seamless customer experience.” ATIB has become one of the first banks in Libya to introduce online onboarding of its customers—and the time-to-market of the project was significantly reduced thanks to ARIS. “In just two months, we went from development to go-live,” says Wissam S Mohammed. “We could clearly visualize the different processes in ARIS, and that helped us rapidly define the business and control requirements and then model the product in record time.” 
• Operational risk was another priority, and ARIS has allowed the bank to ensure compliance while simultaneously improving operational efficiency. “We wanted to simplify our financing processes,” explains Hesham M Wali, “which were highly complex, as they need to comply with the Murabaha financing exigence.” Using ARIS, ATIB was able to compare the current version of the processes with its target ‘to-be’ variants. Today, streamlined processes mean that customer financing applications are dealt with much faster and more efficiently. 

“The main benefit of ARIS for our business had been that everyone is now on the same page,” says Hesham M Wali. “It’s become our unique source of reliable, up-to-date process documentation. Today, everyone is using the same reference point and speaking the same language.”

Process mapping has brought numerous benefits to ATIB—no wonder the bank now wants to explore the further potential of ARIS.

“We’ve started Governance, Risk and Compliance modeling,” says Wissam S Mohammed, “transforming our manual dashboards into digital form.” This aims to comply with regulatory requirements and lower risk management costs.

ATIB is also currently developing a sustainability plan to position itself as a leader among responsible banks in Libya and operationalize around the ESG pillars. It has expressed an interest in the ARIS for Sustainability accelerator, which enables sustainability to be integrated into business process management.

“We also have ambitions to explore process mining,” says Hesham M Wali. “There are so many opportunities to harness intelligent automation with ARIS, and we’re keen to continue our process transformation journey for the benefit of our customers.”