As part of this process, Absa aligned with globally recognized standards, including BIAN, which provides a common framework for designing and integrating banking systems. The goal is to give banks a blueprint to successfully modernize complicated legacy architectures by defining standardized business capabilities, service domains, APIs, and data models.

The new integration layer provided three critical things for the business: decoupling and abstraction, standardization, and strategic orchestration. This meant separating customer-facing channels from core banking and backend services, using BIAN frameworks to enforce strict governance, and orchestrating only where necessary to keep the architecture lean.

Choosing the right implementation strategy

With this plan in mind, the bank needed to decide how to execute it. “We took a phased approach to the rollout, starting with a specific use case, our chatbot Chat Banking in our Africa Regions business,” says Dutuma. “This allowed us to build and test the new integration layer in a controlled, practical way. From there, we introduced an architecture principle that all new initiatives would integrate through this platform, while only time-critical projects continued to rely on the legacy environment.” The goal was to set a North Star project, which allowed them to quickly demonstrate value.