Al Mulla Exchange
Background
Al Mulla Exchange is a leading Financial Institution regulated by the
Central Bank of Kuwait, founded in 2001, and led by strong values of
integrity, trust and confidence of millions of customers. It is part of
Al Mulla Group (www.almullagroup.com). In the short period of its
operations, we have grown to a network of 82 Branches across Kuwait, and
have more than 1 Million active customers transacting with us. This has
been achieved by continuous investment in our people, our operations, our
technology and our systems, the cumulative effect of which has help us
realize our Motto, which is "We aim to beat customer expectations, not
just meet them".
Al Mulla Exchange has regional and global ambitions. We have forayed into
Oman and Bahrain where we operate under the brand name “Modern Exchange”.
Modern Exchange Co, Oman presently has 28 branches, and was acquired by us
in 2010. Modern Exchange Co, Bahrain with a present network of 17 branches
was established in 2015 in partnership with Prominent Bahraini individuals.
At Al Mulla Exchange, we pride ourselves on being a Compliant Global
Financial Institution, by continuously investing in our technology and our
people for ensuring maximum compliance in respect of best practices for AML
and KYC processes. At the same time, we keep trying to improve the customer
experience at our branches and through our digital delivery systems.
Business Needs & Challenges
When a customer walks into any of Al Mulla Exchange branches, s/he is
presented with a plethora of currency exchange services. Each service
requires the identification of the customer. For first-time customers,
this is a time-consuming and error-prone activity. In order to serve the
customer as soon as possible, the receptionist needs to either capture
less details about the customer, or spend more time.
The customer is planning to enhance the customer experience by introducing
a mobile workforce who is responsible to capture the details of the customer
as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Characteristics of a viable solution
A viable solution needs to provide the following capabilities:
- Provide an Android library to allow capturing of the customer's demographics from the Smart Civil ID.
- Allow the development of a mobile application that would empower the mobile workforce to expand the reach of the business.
- Reduce time and effort, enhance data accuracy.
Solution
Al Mulla Exchange teamed with Sharper Software to provide a Mobile
Smart Civil ID reader
for every Mobile Workforce. Sharper Software
delivered a mobile reader and the accompanying software to
Al Mulla Exchange, who in turn developed a mobile application that connected
to their back-end systems to capture the details of the customer and to
update data when necessary. The result is an Android mobile device application
that can read a customer's demographics using her/his Smart Civil ID then
processes the remittance transaction data back to the mobile unit. The
customer's name in both English and Arabic, Sex, Date of Birth, Blood Group,
Nationality, Address, etc. are all captured automatically off the Smart
Civil ID and displayed on the mobile application's interface. This saves
time and effort required to capture customer data accurately. Since this
information is maintained by the Public Authority for Civil Information,
all such data is according to the official records.
