Branch Automation at an African Tier-1 Bank — 56% Teller-Task Reduction Across 800 Branches

MindMap deployed an in-branch platform composed of Helpdesk Automator (Hd) as the transaction-orchestration layer, DocuMage as the document-intelligence layer (eliminating most paper forms), Multi-Agent Orchestrator (Mo) for the multi-system transaction processing, FaceMatch (Fm) for customer-identity validation and Policy Q&A Agent (Pq) as the teller's policy-and-procedure assistant. The platform was packaged into a tablet-led teller workstation that replaced the previous core-banking-terminal-and-paper-form workflow.

Phase one was the transaction-flow rebuild. We worked with the bank's branch-operations team to redesign the top 20 transaction flows around the new platform. Each flow was designed to be tablet-led — the teller and the customer interact across the tablet, with the customer providing inputs (signature, biometric confirmation, transaction confirmation) directly through the tablet rather than through paper.

Phase two was the document elimination. Approximately 78% of the paper forms that the previous workflow generated were eliminated by the new platform — replaced by tablet-captured inputs with customer biometric confirmation. The remaining 22% — primarily forms required by regulation in physical form — are completed as templated tablet outputs that are printed once for customer retention rather than completed manually.

Phase three was the teller redeployment. With the transaction time per teller reduced, the bank's branch operations team was able to redeploy teller capacity into the new branch role design: relationship bankers (focused on customer relationship management), product advisors (focused on cross-sell and product education), and service ambassadors (focused on branch-floor customer guidance). The transaction-processing role itself was retained but reduced in headcount per branch.

The platform runs as a hybrid: the central orchestration and audit layer lives in the bank's primary data centre, while branch-specific processing (transaction queuing, document capture, customer-tablet interaction) runs on a branch-local appliance that maintains a sync to the central platform.

The teller tablet runs a custom Android application that wraps the platform's APIs and provides the unified transaction workflow. The branch-local appliance handles the local-network performance optimisation — most transaction processing completes inside the branch's local network rather than requiring a round-trip to the central data centre — and provides a degraded-mode capability when the branch's connection to the central network is impaired.

DocuMage's document-intelligence runs partly on-tablet (for the document-capture validation that needs to be instant — checking that the customer's ID document is in frame, in focus and not occluded) and partly on the branch-local appliance (for the full extraction that drives the transaction processing). The on-tablet component is a Phi-3.5-vision-based small model; the appliance-based component is a fine-tuned LLM optimised for the bank's specific document types.

Multi-Agent Orchestrator coordinates the cross-system transaction processing — a typical money-transfer transaction involves the core banking platform, the SWIFT or regional payment-rail gateway, the fraud-and-screening engine, the audit-and-compliance system and the customer-notification system. The orchestrator parallelises where possible and serialises where dependencies require, with built-in retry-and-rollback handling for partial failures.

Integration with the core banking platform (Flexcube in the home market, Finacle in two of the other markets) is via the existing core-banking APIs, with the platform adding caching and parallelisation but not replacing the underlying core. The bank did not need to replace the core banking platform.