Digital Readiness Assessment

What the assessment measures

Five areas, each scored out of nine. Here is what we look at in every area, and what we would suggest at each level, whether or not you take the assessment itself.

1. 01

   Customer Channels & Onboarding

   How customers reach you (app, web, USSD, agent, branch) and how long it takes a new customer to go from interest to actively transacting.

   Scoring 0 to 3

   Pick the single journey that drives the most branch traffic (often account opening or funds transfer) and make it work end to end on one channel before adding any others. Build it on a shared service layer from the start, because that is what makes the second and third channel an extension rather than a rebuild.

   Scoring 4 to 6

   Your channels work, but they are drifting apart: the same product behaves differently on app, web and USSD. Move the business rules into one shared API layer so a change to a limit or a fee is made once, then add the missing low-bandwidth channel on top of it rather than beside it.

   Scoring 7 to 9

   You are past the build stage, so the remaining gains are in journey quality: onboarding drop-off, time to first transaction, recovery from failed payments. Instrument each step and treat channel work as continuous product improvement instead of projects. Channel and onboarding engineering, including USSD and eKYC flows, is part of what we build.

2. 02

   Payments & Core Integration

   How money and instructions move between your channels, your core system and your partners; how much of that movement is automated rather than reconciled by hand.

   Scoring 0 to 3

   Manual re-keying and morning spreadsheet reconciliation are where leakage and disputes hide, and both can usually be addressed before any new channel is built. Start by putting a single integration layer in front of your core system, so every future connection is built once instead of once per channel.

   Scoring 4 to 6

   Point-to-point integrations work until the fourth one, and then every change touches four systems. Consolidating them into one payments and integration service gives you a single place to define transaction states and automate reconciliation, which is what removes the manual matching step rather than speeding it up.

   Scoring 7 to 9

   With rails and reconciliation working, the value moves to resilience and reach: partner failover, retry and settlement behavior under load, and controlled APIs for partners and merchants. Payments platforms, core-system integration and open banking APIs are part of what we build.

3. 03

   Data & Decisioning

   Whether your numbers arrive fast enough to act on, and whether decisions about credit, pricing and customers are made from live data or from judgement alone.

   Scoring 0 to 3

   Before any analytics or AI work, agree one set of definitions and one place where the numbers live. Disagreeing spreadsheets are a data-plumbing problem, not a reporting one. A modest warehouse plus two or three dashboards that leadership genuinely uses beats a large platform nobody opens.

   Scoring 4 to 6

   You have trustworthy headline numbers; the gap is decision-making at the level of the individual customer. Take one repeated manual decision (a credit limit, a dormancy campaign, a fee waiver), put it on explicit rules or a scorecard fed by live transaction data, and measure the outcome before automating the next one.

   Scoring 7 to 9

   At this level the real risks are model drift, silent data-quality regressions and decisions nobody can explain, not access to data. Put monitoring and clear explainability around every automated decision, and treat new AI and machine learning work as an extension of that governed pipeline rather than a separate experiment on the side.

4. 04

   Security, Identity & Compliance

   How you prove who is on the other end of a session, control who inside the organization can do what, and evidence both to an auditor or regulator on request.

   Scoring 0 to 3

   Shared logins and after-the-fact fraud discovery are the two findings that cost the most in an audit, and neither requires replacing a core system to fix. Start with a central identity platform with multi-factor authentication and role-based access, then add transaction monitoring on your highest-value channel first.

   Scoring 4 to 6

   Your controls exist but are applied unevenly across systems, which is precisely what an audit surfaces. Bring the remaining systems onto single sign-on, extend fraud rules beyond the busiest channel to all of them, and centralize audit logging so producing evidence stops being a project each time.

   Scoring 7 to 9

   Your controls are in place, so the work now is keeping them provable: scheduled access reviews, tested incident response, and rule tuning as fraud patterns change. Building your regulatory reporting obligations into the data pipeline itself turns evidence into a query rather than an exercise.

5. 05

   Delivery, Cloud & Ownership

   How quickly an approved change reaches customers, how your systems behave when something fails, and whether you own the code and the knowledge behind them.

   Scoring 0 to 3

   Slow, risky releases and unowned code are the same problem seen from two sides: the knowledge lives outside your organization. Ask your current partner for a repository handover, build and deployment documentation and an architecture walkthrough. We work on the basis that the client owns the source code and documentation from day one.

   Scoring 4 to 6

   Your delivery works but is still an event rather than a routine. Automate build, test and deployment for one application first and run a genuine recovery test instead of trusting an untested backup; both lower risk far more than another feature release would.

   Scoring 7 to 9

   With fast, reversible releases and tested recovery, your constraint becomes architecture: which legacy components block change, and in what order to modernize them. A documented target architecture with a staged migration plan is worth more at this point than another platform purchase, and enterprise architecture and legacy modernization guidance of that kind is core to what we do.