Major Financial Service Provider Cuts Costs in Unexpected Places

A major financial service provider is on a journey to realise data-driven decision making. To achieve this, data needed to be centralised. The financial service provider partnered with Synthesis Software Technologies to create this consolidated view. However, while busy on the project, the Synthesis team found data cost savings in a usually overlooked place.

Top 4 Bank Delivers Data-Driven Value

Data is gold but only when mined and managed properly. With this in mind, a Top 4 Bank’s Data Engineering team foresaw the benefits of big data and real-time streaming very early on. However, its on-premises were not catering for its data needs and was causing a series of problems. The bank wanted to migrate all its data to AWS and swiftly.  It would need to migrate on mass both live and archived data to the cloud, with automatic deployments to ensure high availability. The bank needed to find a way to migrate this data without customer disruption and with future-focused architecture.

Trackmatic & Synthesis Provision for the Future

Trackmatic approached Synthesis to not merely go to cloud, while maintaining a hybrid model, but to create a safe, scalable and affordable production environment that provisioned for the future. “Our clients need to keep paying the same amounts and just get more value as we evolve the product. As always, it's been a big part of our way of work to capacitate our infrastructure, our systems, and our business long ahead of the need for it,” explains Slotow.

Riskscape maps the future

Riskscape, a specialist actuarial modelling company, has turned demographic and asset locations into data gold mines. The company builds intuitive, effective spatial location intelligence in South Africa. Mapping the locations of properties, ownership and risk features, it has answered questions for property, financial and insurance sectors. These questions include everything from property worth, the average income of property owners, mortgage risk and the effect of climate change on the bottom line. The solutions effectively enhance the information available for assessing components of financing and insurance of properties, and levels the information playing field between buyers and sellers. However, this market innovator needed a solution that would enable its growth (estimated to be significant within the year) and not limit its potential – a solution as innovative as the company itself.

SA Harvest transforms Mandela Day

Mandela Day ignites generosity and action. However, often, as quickly as the impetus to give arises, so does it pass. How does a non-profit take the energy of the day and convert it into long-term tangible impact? This was the question of SA Harvest, a non-profit organisation that redistributes surplus food to ensure hungry and malnourished South Africans receive nutritious meals. Their ultimate mission is to end hunger in South Africa through a combination of food rescue, technology and systemic change.  

Vitality Group Sets a New Pace with Agile Contracting

Two key components underlie today’s most successful organisations – innovative business models and agility. Vitality Group has both, but the agile organisation has taken this one step further. It has taken innovation and agility and applied this to contracting. Vitality Group entered into an agile contract with Synthesis Software Technologies and is witnessing the benefits of increased efficiency, effectiveness and speed, ensuring it fast-tracks fulfilling customer needs.

Neu Capital Africa Opens the Doors to Africa

How does Africa grow and prosper? The answer is by matching the right businesses with the right investors. This in a nutshell is the expertise of the award-winning capital matching company, Neu Capital Africa, that helps established African mid-market companies and professional investors find each other and work out the best deal. Recently, the company was retained by a leading international government agency in Africa to run its capital matching across the continent. This new business, with its already extensive database, meant that the company had to find a way to ensure it was set up as the perfect mechanism to quickly and effectively match company to capital.

Standard Bank Streamlines Compliance Reporting

Synthesis combines RegTech experience and AWS to deliver Compliance Solutions to Standard Bank. Good Governance means adhering to all applicable laws, regulations, policies and procedures. In practice, these processes are often complex and time consuming for employees. Standard Bank’s Compliance division recognised the need to re-engineer its approach to managing employee outside interests, gifts and trading declarations – commonly called “Conflicts and Risk Management solutions”. These solutions are categorised as Know Your Employee (KYE) which assesses an employee’s conduct to identify any conflicts of interest.

Surafusion Set to Scale

Surafusion is set to scale and take on more clients. However, while a company’s client base should change, its reliability should not. As a company that provides data reconciliation and reporting for large retailers and their franchises and vendors, reliability is paramount. Surafusion provides a modern, enterprise-class, fully web-based reconciliation platform to its clients. It wanted to ensure customer satisfaction, reliability, data security and compliance as it grows. It reached out to Synthesis Software Technologies, an innovative software development and consulting company, and it began its journey, ensuring its platform could manage all of the above and more as it scaled.

Standard Bank Seamlessly Transitions to Cloud  

Standard Bank decided to migrate its on-premise Atlassian toolset onto the AWS infrastructure and partnered with Synthesis to ensure best practices were adhered to and a seamless transition was possible. 

GovChat and SASSA Stretch the Limits of Cloud

The story behind the solution that assisted an estimated 10 million citizens to apply for COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress Grants.

On 21 April, President Cyril Ramaphosa addressed the South African nation. He advised that additional social relief would be put in place to address the detrimental economic effects of COVID-19 through the COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress Grant. SASSA had the prodigious task of ensuring millions of individuals would be able to access their needed grants and quickly. They were determined to live up to the SASSA slogan – paying the right social grants, at the right time and place. NJALO! To meet what would be unprecedented demand, they decided to digitalise the grant application process. They contacted GovChat and within six days a project of magnitude like none they had ever experienced before was completed. Synthesis, GovChat’s technology partner, created a highly scalable and citizen-friendly system using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to aid millions of citizens.

A ‘Top 4 Bank’ Re-imagines Communication Powered by Personalisation

Synthesis provides the technological advantage that allows a South African ‘Top 4 Bank’ to deliver contextually relevant conversations to its customers, delivered at the right time and through the right channel. It is estimated that a person sees 5,000 adverts a day and most of this content is unsolicited, ill-timed and inappropriate. Customers are overwhelmed by the volume of advertisements, emails and messages they are exposed to and have developed mental filters to block the influx of messages. But these mental filters mean the customer often misses out on valuable and relevant information. With this in mind, the Bank sought to communicate the most contextually relevant conversations with its customers, through the most suitable mediums and at the optimum time, based on their personal requirements and preferences. Synthesis, with its history of innovation and expertise in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), was the ideal candidate to partner with on the personalisation journey.

A ‘Top 4’ Bank Takes Brand to New Heights with AWS Cloud

A South African Bank required a system that would allow them holistic brand control that would enable its vision, allow for fast deployments, and provide it with an ability to scale. The Bank consulted Synthesis Software Technologies to take it to the AWS Cloud to maximise on its brand possibilities and in doing so enable its customers.

Investec Mauritius: An Out of the Ordinary Technology Journey

In 2009 Synthesis Software Technologies, an innovative software development and consulting company, partnered with Investec Mauritius to translate client requirements into technology realities. Since then, Investec Mauritius has developed a fully-fledged banking system that has experienced numerous evolutions and incremental changes over the past decade.

Synthesis Keeps the Pulse of Employees Upbeat

Synthesis has always been a company with a closely connected culture. However, as Synthesis grew at an exceptional rate, it was becoming difficult to keep in touch with employees at the levels that we prefer and are accustomed to. We experienced resource growth of approximately 40% over the past 12 months and expect this growth to continue due to existing and future demand trends. How would we ensure employee wellbeing, measure employee-project fit, combine multiple data points, track programmes and more at the same level of efficiency, if not higher? Fortuitously, we started asking these questions and implemented a solution prior to the onset of COVID-19. The results were so successful that we have now extended the solution to clients.

TymeBank automates SARS reporting with Synthesis’ txstream SARS Suite

TymeBank implemented a sustainable solution to meeting South African Revenue Services’ (SARS) annual deadlines for IT3(b) and FATCA CRS reporting with the use of the Synthesis txstream SARS suite. The solution automates SARS reporting and will, in future, scale to accommodate TymeBank’s growing customer base.

Al Baraka Bank Streamlines SARB reporting

Banks face the onerous task of compliance reporting. They need to continuously stay up to date with changing SARB requirements. When banks are not compliant with these requirements, heavy fines and reputational risks result. Al Baraka Bank, a world leader in Islamic banking, priotitise meeting SARB requirements. The bank recently modernised its core banking platform and consulted Synthesis to integrate this new system with the SARB through txstream which resulted in a streamlined reporting solution.

Absa achieves profit of control

ABSA is moving towards data-driven decision-making, but one of its major pain points is that it still does not have a single view of its infrastructure. The bank had configuration data that existed across three different CMDBs migrating onto a single platform, and multiple Security and Technology tools providing data of the estate (network access, patching, endpoint protection). One of the burning questions asked to CIOs is, “What does our risk posture look like”, which can only be answered when its disparate systems can be viewed as a single source.

Confident and Synthesis enhance customer experience

Confident, a boutique wealth management firm in Mauritius, creates and manages customised investment strategies for high-net-worth individuals and institutional clients in Mauritius and abroad. The Confident team foresaw a need to create a digital channel to enhance the client experience. They also sought to manage clients’ wealth efficiently and effectively through an easy and intuitive trading and reporting platform. They reached out to Synthesis to create a custom-made wealth management software platform to support their unique service offering.

Synthesis migrates the AFGRI eAccounts banking platform to AWS in six months

AFGRI Agri Services is a leading agricultural services company with core competencies to enhance, support and guide the growth of agricultural enterprises. Afrgri eAccounts is a banking platform like no other. It is designed to enable farmers and allows them to manage their entire financial operations on one convenient platform. They can also view and receive invoices, calculate storage rates according to grade and grade type and draw reports of grain delivery. AFGRI’s vision is to unlock agricultural potential and its banking platform eAccounts had to be built on infrastructure that enables all of the above and more. As farmers and their needs grow, so would the scale, innovation and capabilities of the platform. AFGRI contacted long-term tech partner, Synthesis Software Technologies, and within as little as six months, eAccounts was sitting on Cloud and reaping its benefits.

Afgri launches into cloud with an AWS Landing Zone

AFGRI Agri Services is a leading agricultural services company with core competencies to enhance, support and guide the growth of your agricultural enterprise.

As an enterprise with a diverse range of unique applications Afgri was seeking to move workloads to the cloud. The Afgri Landing Zone (LZ) project set to implement a platform to onboard various teams within the company to begin their cloud journey. Teams required an efficient automated process to take the necessary first steps in building or migrating a workload to cloud.

WAICA Re migrates business critical applications into the AWS Cloud

WAICA Re is a reinsurance organisation headquartered in Sierra Leone with regional offices and subsidiaries in Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Tunisia, Kenya and Zimbabwe. WAICA Re provides reinsurance services to the Insurance sector across countries in the African continent, Middle East and Asia territories.

Cracking machine learning to speed up client service

Nedbank Insurance and its service provider Synthesis have used machine learning and design thinking to solve a complex challenge that every business faces: How do you channel a sea of emails so that they land at the right desks? How do you automate email routing? In the past Nedbank Insurance employees spent eight hours a day reading and categorising emails. A robot now does it 24/7 to make sure that clients get a quick response. It’s helped Nedbank Insurance to clear its main client inbox 7,5 times faster, to get rid of the backlog and to speed up client service. And there seems to be great potential for this application to be used across the organisation to drive efficiencies.

GovChat keeps 50 million citizens connected

GovChat will soon officially launch its tailored technology platform that will enable millions of citizens to communicate with all arms of the South African government. GovChat has been appointed as the official citizen engagement platform for such purpose. The platform will enable citizens to inter alia, report and rate government service delivery, record service faults and weaknesses and enable service providers, civil servants and ward councillors et al, to track such claims and complaints and follow-up on remedial actions.

Approximately two months ago, Synthesis commenced the development of this compelling platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Using highly scalable services from AWS ensures that the platform will meet the expected demand and growth in adoption, enabling the country’s 50 million citizens to extract maximum benefits and satisfaction through its use.

EasyEquities Accelerates its Cloud Journey

EasyEquities, an innovative South Africa investment platform, began its journey into the Amazon Web Services in 2019. EasyEquities sought to implement a robust cloud infrastructure based on best practices and they needed a partner to accelerate the journey. EasyEquities consulted Synthesis due to their vast experience of working with AWS and their track record of delivering solutions for blue-chip financial service providers.

Sasfin integrates Synthesis Finsurv reporting into its new Calypso suite

When Sasfin replaced its legacy payment system, continued compliance with the South African Reserve Bank's (SARB) Finsurv reporting regulations was critical. The Synthesis tXstream Finsurv solution fitted well. Integrated into the bank's new Calypso platform, it enables automated compliance support, significantly lowering reporting effort and increasing accuracy and efficiency.

Cim Finance: Innovation with Amazon Web Services to create digital platforms

Cim Finance is a well-established financial services provider in Mauritius. Their core business model is based on delivering affordable finance to less privileged communities in Mauritius, which require flexible solutions to improve their quality of life.

Cim Finance and Synthesis launch Aspira in Kenya—in just 6 months, using agile, mobile and AWS cloud

To launch its Africa expansion strategy and gain first mover advantage, Cim Finance, the largest non-bank financial service provider in Mauritius, has taken an agile and cloud approach, delivering spectacular results!

Synthesis uses machine learning to speed up Absa – Barclays brand separation

When Barclays announced that it would separate from the Absa group, Absa’s brand team got busy. With a limited period to identify and remove all Barclays logos and mentions from key documentation, websites, contracts, database structures, marketing and communications, it needed an innovative alternative to man hours. Specialist software provider Synthesis stepped up with an agile approach to help deliver a solution using machine learning and a microservices cloud-based architecture.

ProximityID – Synthesis Prototype and Proof of Technology

ProximityID is a start-up that provides instant identification. They digitally link their users’ respective details, loyalty cards, access cards and parking tickets and consolidate them into their users’ smart phone. There is no need to produce any loyalty card, swipe an access card or even take out a mobile phone.

Synthesis helps Vitality re-architect for global scalability and agility

Vitality Group has built a massively flexible and scalable platform for its Vitality wellness solution using a microservices architecture. To improve the stability, speed of deployment and performance of the Vitality solution for customers—leading insurers across the globe—specialist software solution provider Synthesis has redesigned the underlying Kubernetes container orchestration platform on which the Vitality application is deployed.

InvestSure goes live at digital speed with Synthesis

InvestSure is a disruptive new start-up in the insurance industry. It insures share owners against losses as a result of deceptive or misleading acts by companies.

Large SA Bank BOP Reporting

A large South African bank selected Synthesis' Balance of Payments (BoP) reporting system and now benefits from a centralised reporting system, easily upgradable should compliance requirements change, as well as fast, accurate reporting.

AFGRI e-Accounts

Synthesis developed a sophisticated digital channel for AFGRI, a leading agricultural services company, to enable farmers to administer and manage their entire farming operations.

Mama Money

Africa’s first cashless money transfer operator, Mama Money, uses txstream Finsurv software from Synthesis for error-free, automatic daily reporting to the South African Reserve Bank (SARB).

SSO_Silica Outsourced Online Security Solution

Silica, an asset management administrator with a blue chip client base outsourced their online security needs to Synthesis.

Investec Single Sign On Solution

We provided a global financial services company with a solution that enabled clients a single sign-on functionality, regardless of which global account they were using.

New Bank Payments Integration Solution

Investec BOP solution

We worked with Investec to reduce the complexity of their Balance of Payments process.

Absa Finsurv smart BOP form

Synthesis created a solution for Absa to obtain import and export finsurv data from its clients.

Absa CDV solution

In South Africa, Check Digit Verification (CDV) has grown organically over the years. As a result, it is often difficult for banks to check whether their implementation is aligned to that of Bankserv.

Investec Finsurv Solution

We assisted one of our long-standing customers, Investec, in developing their South African Reserve Bank (SARB) reporting blueprint. This blueprint was essential to confirm that the bank had a plan in place to report according to best practice.

SAVCA SARS solution

Synthesis was able to assist the South African Venture Capital Organisation in consolidating their reporting across the group with an innovative cloud solution.

A large international bank – SARS solution

Synthesis assisted a large international bank in bringing their SARS reporting up to date.

Capitec SARS solution

Synthesis has successfully assisted Capitec with streamlining their SARS reporting. When they approached us, the rapidly growing bank was struggling to reduce the time spent preparing SARS IT3B reports.

Absa Markets Solution

Over 15 years ago, we were approached by one of the largest bond traders in South Africa to assist with their back office infrastructure.

VATit Business Transformation Solution

Synthesis was asked to assist a global VAT reclamations business in transforming its business.

Investec Mauritius Online Banking

Investec Mauritius now offers a sophisticated, user-friendly online banking platform for its customers, who include high net-worth individuals and corporates.

Absa Online Authentication Solution

Synthesis devised an airtight authentication solution for a bank wishing to protect the login details of its clients.