Project: A comprehensive digital platform for an international challenger bank

Launched in 2019, Kuda is a fintech company with a mission to make financial services accessible, affordable, and rewarding for users throughout Africa and its diaspora. Kuda wanted to expand its service offering to other locations and boost retention rates. To accomplish this, the company needed to build a new app with a focus on user experience (UX) to replace the current legacy app. The key priorities for the new app included meeting international compliance and security standards and enabling future scaling and international expansion. At this stage, HTEC joined the project as a technology partner, providing the technical expertise to support Kuda’s business know-how and expansion plans.    

Challenge: Building a multi-purpose digital banking app in record time

Kuda brought HTEC in to support its internal engineering team in building a comprehensive digital banking app — specifically assisting with extensive expansions and improvements to the backend platform. HTEC’s team was also responsible for ensuring the platform could handle a wide range of banking services, from basic financial transactions to savings, loans, and wealth management.

Aside from the project’s highly complex and specialized domains of banking services and international regulations, the app’s short development and launch timeline presented an added challenge. Kuda wanted to accelerate the product’s time to market and position it well in Africa’s highly competitive digital banking sector. 

In short, HTEC needed to move quickly without jeopardizing the quality, reliability, and functionality of a complex system in a complex and multi-faceted domain. 

Solution: A robust 360-degree digital banking platform

Kuda entrusted HTEC’s team of experts with developing some of the crucial parts of the backend system. They provided the technical backbone to support a full range of banking services, including: 

• Payment
• Remittance 
• Savings and investment 
• Wealth management  

One of the most challenging aspects of HTEC’s work was developing the onboarding flow. This included implementing Know-Your-Customer (KYC) procedures to positively identify app users and conduct due diligence on their financial track record. The KYC protocol also added an additional layer of international regulatory compliance that Kuda’s app needed to meet.   

In just ten months, Kuda and HTEC’s engineering teams developed a retail banking platform utilizing user data analytics to optimize the UX design and improve customer transactions within the app. The new app also featured a full range of services and created a reliable foundation for future scaling opportunities. 

Success: Accelerated international expansion and growth opportunities

The collaboration’s goal was to develop a robust, high-performing application that was easy to use, reliable, secure, and scalable. HTEC helped achieve those objectives in a ten-month span. 

Aside from accelerating the development process, the team also helped accelerate Kuda’s international expansion. Since the start of the collaboration, Kuda has more than doubled its user base, recently reaching the milestone of 7 million users. The app is already available to users in the UK, and Kuda is working to ensure the product is geo-agnostic and compliant with various regional regulations, particularly North America’s and Western Europe’s. 

“The collaboration with HTEC has been highly productive and strategic, enabling our successful transition to a distributed team with a diverse culture. HTEC’s experience and expertise were instrumental in rebuilding our mobile app. They played a key role in establishing robust foundational standards to ensure the app’s scalability and maintain its well-structured design. Their contributions to design and architecture decisions, as well as the implementation of innovative components, have been pivotal in Kuda’s ability to deliver fast, reliable, and high-performing financial services at scale.”

Oladipo Aina, VP Techology, Kuda

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