Crown Agents Bank accelerates global growth and expands into new markets with MuleSoft

Crown Agents Bank accelerates global growth and expands into new markets with MuleSoft

Increases payment processing capacity by more than 3,000%

Reduces delivery of new integration projects from months to just days

MuleSoft today announced that&Crown Agents Bank is using MuleSoft to digitally transform its core payments services and accelerate business growth. Crown Agents Bank is a UK regulated provider of wholesale foreign exchange (FX) and cross-border payment services, connected across frontier and emerging markets. Crown Agents Bank is committed to delivering connected experiences across its digital payments and mobile money services to meet the increasing needs of its customers. With MuleSoft, Crown Agents Bank is able to seamlessly connect to fintech partners and scale faster, increasing the number of payments it can process by more than 3,000%.

“Our primary objective is to drive financial inclusion in areas of the world that traditionally don’t have access to financial services,” said Osita Ngene, Enterprise Architect Lead, Crown Agents Bank. “Scalability is key to serving a wider market. We also need to be able to work with local fintech partners like digital payment providers, mobile wallets, and aggregators, who have a footprint in the markets we serve. That’s why APIs have become critical, giving us the flexibility to scale up our own systems rapidly and connect with those of others to offer payment services wherever they’re needed.”

Building a composable, digital bank

Crown Agents Bank previously relied on custom code that created tightly coupled, one-off integrations between front-end services and its core banking systems. As the bank built out and scaled its digital initiatives, it needed a new process that would adapt to changing market needs, such as handling higher transaction volumes. With API-led connectivity, Crown Agents Bank has transformed into a composable digital bank that can seamlessly connect with its ecosystem of fintech partners and quickly scale up capacity to support its continued expansion into new markets.

Initially, the architecture team built an API to integrate two core processing services to support its move into payments and FX. This enabled Crown Agents Bank to create an in-house sanction screening capability, so it could handle a higher volume of small transactions without increasing the risk of money laundering. With MuleSoft, Crown Agents Bank can now safely process 1,900 transactions in just five minutes.

Rapidly expanding into new markets

In 2019, Crown Agents Bank acquired Segovia to offer its customers a payment gateway to frontier and emerging markets. Segovia’s mobile money solutions and modern payments infrastructure are central to Crown Agents Bank’s plans to accelerate its expansion into new markets, such as Africa. By building APIs on MuleSoft, Crown Agents Bank seamlessly integrated Segovia’s payment gateway with its core banking systems and other internal and third-party payment services. This has enabled the bank to increase the number of payments it can process from 1,500 per day, to 50,000. In the future, these APIs will enable Crown Agents Bank to become less reliant on its legacy systems, providing a further boost to digital agility.

Accelerating digital innovation

MuleSoft has enabled Crown Agents Bank to speed up innovation across its business by reusing the APIs it creates across multiple services. To support this, the bank has adopted an API-led approach, building around 30 APIs. Approximately 90% of these APIs can be reused to power additional experiences beyond their initial use-case. MuleSoft’s API monitoring capabilities are also helping Crown Agents Bank to manage the performance of these integrations as it continues to expand in new markets, enabling it to predict periods of high demand.

“MuleSoft has been invaluable in helping scale up our business and accelerate growth,” continued Ngene. “The ability to decouple our services from legacy infrastructure and integrate them more seamlessly with new technologies is allowing us to future-proof our digital capabilities. We’ve also seen a significant reduction in costs and accelerated project delivery dramatically. We’re able to complete digital initiatives in weeks, or just days, instead of months. That’s time our developers and architects can now invest in more strategic projects, which helps to accelerate our expansion into new markets and offer even better services to our customers.”