Well, i didnt have internal insights from Bank of Khartoum to understand more how they are plan for their scaling, it is merely just me reading their current marketing strategies. For more insights i argue the readers to read more on our competitors page through this link. For your convinience, i will copy a few items from there:

Marketing channels

Bok uses all of the available marketing channels, including:

  • social media
  • billboards
  • TV and radio
  • excessive network of sales agents allowed them to reach most of stores and supermarkets in Khartoum (GUYS, epayment still didn’t reach states and regions outside khartoum!)

However, a very notable thing is this, Bank of Khartoum has:

  • ~300 ATMS

  • 200 BRANCH! Extreme figure!

To think that a bank has roughly the same offices and branches as their ATM is just crazy. Another note to take here is that by definition every branch will come off with an ATM device.

Bank of Khartoum is heavily investing in their branches, which is counter-intuitive by all means. Let’s try to understand why they are investing in their offices and branches rather than using other means to scale up their operations.

Call center

Another place where bank of khartoum is also heavily investing on is their call centers agents. Bank of Khartoum is scaling up their business and their offering by adding more humans to the equation, by investing in more offices and branches. But WHY is that? And also does that play well?

  • Sudan is a very youth country. Every year we have around 100K new college graduates. A good chunk of them are STEM degree holders. Except for very elite schools (eg UofK), getting a job is really very challenging. In the past years, Tirhal and other gig jobs. And call centers agents used to fall under this umbrella. Zain for example has outsourced its call center business to an external company.
  • Another thing is also these enterprises are not exactly a technical ones and the way they address their technical issues is quite different than the way usually techie guys do: for BoK, technology is still a second tier when it comes to how important it is to their overal ecosystem. They still operate their businesses with more focus on the human side of things. A software, for them, is prune to errors, bugs and god only knows what. Humans, for them are more reliable.
  • The top management can understand the investment too: for them a software is not worthy, they still didn’t feel the value of a software. Take for example Bankak app: it is very obvious it needs more investment and so, HOWEVER they never made any!