South African-based WIZZIT is a financial inclusion pioneer, focusing on unbanked communities around the world. It engaged with BT to host its innovative mobile banking platform. With BT Cloud Compute the company cost effectively and securely serves banks worldwide. Service delivery is achieved in weeks not months, while costs have reduced by 90 per cent.

With 2.5 billion unbanked people worldwide, financial empowerment can make a real difference to their lives. Collaborating with BT is helping WIZZIT accelerate mobile banking deployment in developing markets like Mexico, Albania, and Brazil, as well as across Africa and beyond.

Making mobile banking accessible to all.

Case study - WIZZIT International.

Working with BT we’ve been able to extend our global reach. It’s a powerful partnership. It’s allowing us to bring banking to the people. That will have a significant impact on financial inclusion worldwide.

Brian RichardsonCo-founder and CEOWIZZIT International

Hosting services from BT help WIZZIT extend the reach of mobile banking for the betterment of people’s lives worldwide.

Case Study - WIZZIT International.

Realising a passion for financial empowerment.Imagine how difficult life would be without a bank account. How do you send money to your family? How do you keep cash safe, or put money aside for a rainy day? More than 2.5 billion unbanked people around the world face such challenges every day.

WIZZIT International is trying to change all that. Second-tier banks are better suited to reaching financially-excluded communities. Providing them with a fully-transactional mobile banking platform, WIZZIT enables real time person-to-person payments and transfers. That’s supported by companion cards – debit, pre-paid or stored value – that let consumers access ATMs and POS terminals.

Brian Richardson, co-founder and CEO, says: “Financial empowerment is our passion. We aim to serve a growing number of unbanked communities globally.” Established in South Africa in 2005, WIZZIT has grown rapidly and now provides services through partner banks to over six million customers in 11 countries across three continents.

The problem is second-tier banks often don’t have the resources to operate the required technology platform. “Our goal is to serve a social need while enabling our partners to make a profit,” Brian adds. “We needed a different business model.”

BT Cloud Compute cost effectively supports global aspirations.Moving to a cloud-based platform would accelerate deployment and reduce the cost of the service to reach a broader market. WIZZIT needed a hosting partner. It chose BT. Dirk Bruynse, chief operating officer, says: “The attraction of BT is that it has an established hosting infrastructure and the ability to securely connect to that from pretty much anywhere in the world.”

The BT Cloud Compute infrastructure has nodes in 19 countries across five continents. “Our aspirations are global,” says Brian Richardson, “so having a hosting partner with global reach was critical to us.”

The BT platform offers the ability to rent virtual computing resources on a pay-as-you-go commercial model for periods from days to years. A demo account was quickly set up for a WIZZIT proof of concept, which proved an immediate success.

“The beauty of a cloud solution is that no investment is required in hardware and our banking clients don’t need specialist resources to run the system,” says Dirk. “This makes it easily affordable. Because the infrastructure’s already in place we can implement our solution in eight weeks. That’s unheard of in financial services.”

Back-end connectivity is via internet-based VPN tunnels, while 3G or Wi-Fi is used for client access from mobile devices. The client application’s thin nature limits data processing demands, making response times virtually instantaneous.

Surmounting security and political sensitivities.Another attraction of the BT Cloud Compute solution is inbuilt security and PCI DSS compliance. “Our client banks are security conscious,” says Brian Richardson. “It’s a high agenda item. Working with BT has helped satisfy the most stringent of banking security protocols.”

However, regulations forbade WIZZIT using a shared multi-tenant firewall, while there was reluctance on the African continent to a system being hosted in South Africa. BT overcame both issues by deploying a virtual FortiGate firewall under full WIZZIT control in a BT Cloud Compute node based in the UK.

Each bank that WIZZIT takes on board gets four virtual servers for app serving. Another virtual server runs the FortiGate firewall software under WIZZIT control.

Financial empowerment is our passion. We aim to serve a growing number of unbanked communities globally. Our goal is to serve a social need while enabling our partners to make a profit.

Brian RichardsonCo-founder and CEOWIZZIT International

The attraction of BT is that it has an established hosting infrastructure and the ability to securely connect to that from pretty much anywhere in the world.

Dirk BruynseChief Operating OfficerWIZZIT International

Case Study - WIZZIT International.

Agility in the cloud helps WIZZIT win new business.The initial deployment of the mobile banking platform on BT Cloud Compute was for an Albanian bank. Having set up a demo in hours thanks to the agility of the BT Cloud Compute infrastructure, WIZZIT won the business.

Brian Richardson says: “The fact that the Albanian bank application is hosted in the UK shows the global capability BT Cloud Compute offers us here in South Africa.”

Deployments for clients in Mexico, Central America and Africa followed. “The Mexican customer is a great example of BT helping win business,” says Dirk. “Banking regulations in Mexico require all domestic financial data be retained in-country, so the fact that BT had a Mexico-based hosting capability closed the sale.”

Playing virtual leap frog with competitive costing.For tier-one banking clients, BT Cloud Compute provides an agile and cost effective compute and storage environment compared with on-premise data centres. Moreover, with cloud it becomes far easier to add additional services to the platform. That virtual approach is becoming ever-more important as traditional banking models give way to transformational digital services.

Meanwhile, smaller institutions can achieve the scale of a major player while speeding time to market. And do that without the cost and management overhead of physical hardware in a purpose-built data centre. That allows them to level the competitive playing field and potentially even leapfrog larger banks.

Says Brian: “Cloud is just 10 per cent of the cost of a bank hosted solution. Individual transactions costs can be as low as eight cents compared with perhaps $3.40 in a traditional banking model.”

Branchless mobile banking also dramatically reduces customer acquisition costs. These are typically 60 per cent of the traditional bricks and mortar approach.

Bringing banking to the people wherever they may be.Taking the WIZZIT technology and service through the cloud allows partner banks to offer profitable mobile banking services for unbanked communities around the world.

It’s helping change people’s lives for the better. For example, rather than spending hours travelling to a money transfer office charging three dollars to send funds to relatives – with the risk of being robbed on the way – with mobile banking the transfer happens in a few seconds at a cost of a few cents.

The move to a hosted solution in the cloud also means WIZZIT has opened its market to smaller financial institutions. These include credit unions, community banks, micro-finance institutions, and savings and credit co-operatives.

Brian Richardson concludes: “Working with BT we’ve been able to extend our global reach. It’s a powerful partnership. It’s allowing us to bring banking to the people. That will have a significant impact on financial inclusion worldwide.”

Offices worldwideThe telecommunications services described in this publication are subject to availability and may be modified from time to time. Services and equipment are provided subject to British Telecommunications plc’s respective standard conditions of contract. Nothing in this publication forms any part of any contract. © British Telecommunications plc 2015. Registered office: 81 Newgate Street, London EC1A 7AJ. Registered in England No: 1800000

June 2016

Find out more:

Contact your BT account manager directly

Core services.• BT Cloud Compute