How Zenus Bank Is Revolutionizing International Digital Banking with Vision Backed by Technology

What sets Zenus Bank apart from many companies, particularly in the banking sector, is that it has had a vision driven by technology from the start. In fact, the company was recently named a US CIO 100 award winner in 2022 for driving digital business growth through technology innovation. But there was more to be done, and the leadership team was not afraid of doing things differently—as long as “different” was done right.

Zenus Bank’s vision is a replicable model—including business-to-business and business-to-business-to-consumer services—which will catapult its customer base well into the millions. That anticipated growth, along with continuing to meet the needs and demands of existing customers, required a strong technology infrastructure that was maintainable, supportable, and seamless, globally scalable, and could easily pivot to support new markets and offerings.

“We built a framework that solves a major bottleneck in cross-border payments and international banking, enabling individuals from all over the world to bank safely within the American banking system,” said Mushegh Tovmasyan, Chairman & Founder of Zenus Bank. “The next step is to optimize our services for B2B and B2B2C enablement around the world. We need to be prepared to scale into millions of users with each client we onboard.”

A Microsoft platform has been in place from the beginning. “What sets us apart is our unique offering but also our focus on operational excellence in IT, so Microsoft was the obvious choice,” said Pedro Martinez, Chief Information Officer. “It offers a blank canvas to design our products and their native tools help us with the omnichannel experience we strive to provide our users and developers. As a result, we’re able to focus on the product and whatever the customer wants.”

But there was more to be done to be ready for serious growth. Like most companies today, Zenus Bank did not have a problem with creating data, but managing it was a big challenge. In just a short time, data had become siloed, making it difficult to measure anything. While there were opportunities for technology to improve processes and the like, data was the key to innovation.

A partner was needed to help build out the infrastructure, and Microsoft recommended HSO. As a global Microsoft Dynamics Partner, we had the capabilities and resources to work as one unified company on projects anywhere on the technology spectrum, anywhere around the world, and with 20+ years in the financial sector, we understood business processes and the regulatory landscape.

Our teams worked together to build a platform based on data—a data lake that enables Zenus Bank to process, manage, view, report, and analyze data in any way they want. It is also built to support millions of transactions and millions of customers.

The infrastructure is rounded out by Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Finance, and Dynamics 365 Marketing, as well as Power BI, the Power Platform, and Microsoft 365 to support data, unified operations, a customer service call center, marketing, and sales.

“Our approach uniquely combines an international banking license with the latest technology and a robust approach to risk and regulatory control to create truly global digital bank, so having the right technology partners is fundamental to us,” continued Tovmasyan. “It was for this reason that we chose Microsoft and HSO to … ensure our technology architecture would have the ability to support and scale with what is sure to be exponential growth.”