Sybrin: Digitally Transform your Business for Tomorrow

The unseen backbone of a company’s forward-facing offerings, technology stacks that sit behind the modern, digital shop window are becoming increasingly complex and expensive. The ongoing shift that sees almost all areas of society transforming digitally – from financial services and retail, through to quick serve restaurant ordering and travel – is driving a need for reliable, proven, and consistent partners with knowledge that goes through the front and back end.  

Coding, software development, programming, plugin management, content interfaces – for most, it truly is a foreign language; acronyms, digits and symbols all pulled together in a matrix of data that must be correctly navigated.  

This is why is pays to team with an expert like Sybrin. Active in more than 20 countries around the world, demonstrating expertise in a large range of systems, and complementing hundreds of customer operations, this South African-headquartered innovator is a powerful partner that provides clarity.  

Sybrin works towards the vision of providing a globally recognised platform, and an app store that enables digital transformation in any industry, giving customers the control, insight, and agility for a competitive advantage. By doing so, the company will help drive growth and prosperity both internally and externally.  

The Sybrin product range currently covers digital banking and payments (Apex), rapid application development (Nitro), and intelligent automation (AI). Through this range, Sybrin has demonstrated its offering recently, completing exciting projects alongside high-profile clients, to drive financial inclusion on the continent.  

INNOVATIVE TECH  

Head of Product and Innovation at Sybrin is Salvatore Errera. He tells Enterprise Africa that the company is endeavouring to help clients comply with important legislation and compliance requirements by delivering new RegTech (Regulatory Technology), SupTech (Supervisory Technology), and GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) solutions.  

“Within the RegTech space, we offer Know Your Customer (KYC), and Know Your Business (KYB) services as well as mobile Software Development Kits (SDKs) and web SDKs for Intelligent ID Capture and Verification, and Passive Liveness Verification. These products help a financial services provider determine the following: Is the ID document valid? Is this person alive? Does the ID belong to the person? Is this person on sanction or politically exposed person (PEP) lists?”  

Currently, these solutions are being implemented at a large insurance company in South Africa, a Pan-African Bank, and a large bank in the Philippines where feedback has been positive.  

Established in 1991, Sybrin has seen societal, legislative, economic and technological transformation across the markets that it operates in. Being up-to-date and on top of a constantly changing ecosystem has become more than just desirable; it is now vital – especially after the Covid-19 pandemic where digitisation is at the forefront of minds.  

“Within the SupTech space, we are currently developing a real-time fraud risk monitoring tool with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,” says Errera. “Key to this tool is the ability to monitor transition for fraud risk in real-time rather than a backend operational task.  

The GRC space is a new area for Sybrin, we are currently testing solutions with a few clients in Africa.” 

SupTech and RegTech solutions have been thrust further into the spotlight in recent years with the explosion of digital currency trading with the likes of Bitcoin and Ethereum. It was reported at the end of 2020 that crypto currency is ready-made for Africa, a continent where mobile money is already embraced by a young, tech-savvy population. Governments around the world are already struggling to keep up with the pace of change in this sphere, and South Africa has even started investigations into a central bank-driven digital currency.  

MOJALOOP 

“We are also working with the Mojaloop Foundation on their low-cost open-source payment switch, which is predominantly focused on serving the non-banked and under-banked though the use of mobile payments,” says Errera. “We are also currently working with a large South African bank and a joint venture of two large cellular operators to provide forex, and therefore remittance capability to the Mojaloop switch. This will allow SMEs and people wanting to send money home a more affordable alternative that can be run from mobile devices. This capability can perform mobile wallet to mobile wallet transactions as well as off-network transactions via SWIFT or traditional banking, including banking to mobile wallet.” 

Sybrin is also involved in the development of the second version of Mojaloop, Reference Architecture 2, where the company’s developers are engaged in the build process. Sybrin will call on all of its experience to transition the platform across to its own payment hub, using traditional payment systems and refining business process APIs.  

“Sybrin was chosen by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as the prime partner to build the open-source transactional monitoring system to be used by any payment system, but in particular, Mojaloop. This is typically one of the most expensive and difficult to run components of a payment system. By making this one component open source, we bring down costs in a payment system, and therefore costs in general,” explains Errera.  

Mobile money and foreign remittance are burgeoning markets in Africa with many tech experts citing the continent as the perfect example of how to solve local problems with local solutions. In April, MTN announced that it would value its mobile money business at more than $5 billion, while some predictions have suggested that the international remittance market in SA could reach R34 billion by 2023. In mobile money, investors are attracted to the growing movement of cash that utilises telco networks’ own subscriber base and offers up the ability for bolt on products, such as microinsurance, to be sold as an extra – crucially, without involvement from banks. Sybrin is well-prepared for further advancement in this space.  

“One of our uniquely intelligent components over other competitors is our Passive Liveness Verification component, which allows us to verify that the person behind a remote interaction is a real person and is physically present with one simple selfie. Liveness detection works with a biometric system to measure and analyse physical characteristics and reactions to determine if a biometric sample is being captured from a living subject who is present at the point of capture. There are two methods to do this, namely, Active and Passive. Most competitors offer Active Liveness Detection, which involves making the user perform a single or set of actions such as blinking, smiling, turning, etc. It is the slowest type of liveness detection and user interaction is compulsory which creates a poor user experience and is easier to spoof. Our Passive Liveness solution ensures frictionless user experience and verification occurs with a single selfie,” underlines Errera.  

These products help clients to digitise, modernise, innovate and automate. A goal of Sybrin is to transform its client’s business into a digital, agile, intelligent enterprise of tomorrow, and by offering assistance all the way through the process, from design to build and implementation, and then ongoing maintenance, Sybrin can provide a turnkey solution.  

“We provide an end-to-end offering,” confirms Errera. “Although we can sell you just one component, there is no need to use other offerings from other vendors. From the intelligent capture of identity documents, and other required paperwork, to the automatic classification and scoring of information that is then orchestrated by our workflow processes and rules engines, we speed up processes, increase those items that need no human intervention, and configure that data for use by AI and other data science means. This is then all easily organised into our case management system for exceptions, those items are flagged for enhanced due diligence and alerts so that they can be intelligently processed. 

“What makes our offerings unique is that all the components are our own IP, plus the solutions are developed using Sybrin Nitro; our own low-code development platform,” he adds, speaking of the flexibility of the current range. “The Sybrin Nitro platform is highly configurable and allows our solutions to quickly and easily be changed for our clients’ unique needs. The platform also allows our customers’ citizen developers to easily make changes to the solution as they see fit.”  

HIGHLY SKILLED  

Engineering tech solutions is no easy task. Perhaps one of the most complicated, most demanding, and most desired skillsets globally, the ability to create digital products and understand the convoluted language that comes with it is challenging.  

In February, IT talent marketplace, OfferZen, released its annual report on the industry. The findings showed clearly the level of demand for qualified developers in South Africa today. “Adopting digital tools to enable fully remote teams is making businesses anti-fragile,” stated Malan Joubert, OfferZen co-founder and CEO. The survey, which took the opinions of more than 3500 local developers, found that AI, Cloud, Enterprise Infrastructure, FinTech, and Cybersecurity are the key areas of growth in the near future.  

Despite the competition in the industry, Sybrin has made a number of important appointments in the past 12-months, following an executive overhaul in 2018. In March ’21, Cameo Mbowane was appointed Head of Client Engagement and Karabo Moloko was made CEO of Sybrin SA. In June, Gerhard Malan was hired as Sybrin CFO. Salvatore Errera is confident and excited about the new-look senior team.  

“Recent appointments have absolutely had an impact,” he says. “In the South African space, Karabo Moloko has already made huge contribution as CEO, both from a brand building as well as a new business perspective. The positioning and focusing of subject matter experts is making a significant difference in establishing Sybrin as a trusted advisor in our areas of focus. In addition, having more senior staff on board shifts the quality of critical conversations in the business which always results in a positive impact.”  

In the 2021 environment, where skills are hard to come by and expensive to attract, making these hires and already seeing genuine return and impact is a real coup.   

“Factors such as the reality of digitisation, and increased fraud are driving the demand for solutions that Sybrin has developed over the last few years. We also need to recognise the fact that there is a shortage of good developers globally, that impacts the ability of our customers to develop these solutions themselves. Our low-code platform is well positioned to mitigate this risk faced by our customers,” says Errera.  

SMOOTH COVID  

Perhaps one of the industries able to sidestep closure effects of the pandemic easiest, IT has largely continued intact. Working remotely, making use of online communication technologies, and working apart while remaining close-knit already felt natural for Sybrin.  

“Adapting to remote working practices was a smooth process for us. We were already very accustomed to working with and supporting our customers in Africa remotely. We also focused on developing new solutions such as our remote onboarding solutions, digital identity, and the Mojaloop Foundation payment switch offering (that improves financial inclusion) to ensure we can support our customers’ digital enablement journeys,” details Errera.  

“We have seen both the demand for new solutions, as well as delays in decision making, as some of our customers reprioritised projects or delayed spending. We have seen demand picking up during 2021 as the need to digitise became a reality for our customers.”  

But the changes in workplace activity, albeit relatively straightforward at Sybrin, have been eclipsed as a focus point by recent news of a transaction which will see the company bought out of the EOH Holdings and become part of an exciting new venture set up by an exhilarating new investment team.  

EOH Holdings acquired Sybrin in 2013 but announced at the start of June that it would unload the company for R334.4 million. The new ownership group is made up of a global private equity fund One Thousand & One Voices Management (1K1V), South Africa-based Crossfin Technology Holdings, and black economic empowerment partners led by Isaac Mophatlane (Co-founder of BCX).  

For Sybrin and Errera, this transaction gives new impetus to the company. “The acquisition gives Sybrin the opportunity to grow our footprint in South Africa as well as expand our offering into markets such as the US and the UK,” he says. “From a South African perspective, there are several businesses in the Crossfin stable that provide synergies and new relationships. 1K1V brings a wealth of relationships and knowledge in the US that will provide new routes to market. In addition, Isaac has established several businesses both in SA and Africa and we will leverage his experience and relationships to grow.”  

Crossfin CEO Dean Sparrow said: “We are confident in the growth opportunity of a technology-led financial services sector globally and see considerable cross-selling opportunities within Sybrin’s customer base and across the diverse African countries in which it already has a presence.” 

This fantastic catalyst for further growth comes at the perfect time for Sybrin as it looks to boost its international appeal. Its success in South Africa is clear and the global digital revolution continues to gather pace at an incessant rate making now the perfect window for Sybrin to boom exponentially. Outside of Africa, and South Africa, the next frontier is the Philippines.  

“One of the more exciting projects we are working on is our expansion into the Philippines where our Intelligent ID and Liveness Verification components are currently being implemented at one of the country’s largest banks,” explains Errera. “Also, one of the more exciting innovations for Sybrin is our Passive Liveness Verification Component, this component has just been tested for conformance against the FIDO PAI standards by an independent lab as well as ISO 30701-3. We have just received our conformance letter from the Lab, and this will allow us to easily sell and distribute the product in any region across the globe.”  

In this business where a culture of creativity is cultivated, the future looks very bright. Sybrin is proving that the often-misunderstood and overlooked world of software development should not be accessible by only the richest businesses around. It should not seem alien, and should be controllable and convenient. As it takes new strides towards its vision, Sybrin continually creates opportunities by partnering with clients in a consultative manner.   

“Many organisations are still limited by legacy systems that are often at the core of their operations and pose a significant challenge to achieving effective, enterprise-wide digital transformation. [Sybrin] brings our deep technical and strategic capabilities to advise, design, and accelerate our client’s digital journey,” says Karabo Moloko.