Sudan public remain frustrated by Bankak app glitches despite update

The persistent malfunctioning of banking application Bankak, Sudan’s most widely used banking application, has deepened customers’ difficulties and become a source of considerable frustration, despite a recent update announced by the management of the Bank of Khartoum.

More than 10m people subscribe to Bankak, making it Sudan’s leading banking application. Other services include Fawry, operated by Faisal Islamic Bank, O-Cash, operated by Omdurman National Bank, and Sahel, operated by Nile Bank, as well as applications offered by Al Baraka, Mashreq, and Al Tadamon.

Bankak has recently experienced an unprecedented level of disruption, despite assurances from the bank’s management that the problems are being addressed.

Mohamed Fadlallah, a resident of Port Sudan, tells Radio Dabanga that customers face severe difficulties in making money transfers, with traders sometimes refusing payments because notifications do not arrive. The application, he says, may freeze or fail to open altogether, leaving customers unable to pay for purchases or obtain essential goods and, in some cases, causing crowds to build up outside shops.

The problem can persist for more than a week or ten days, he adds, rendering the application effectively unusable and creating considerable embarrassment for people attempting to make everyday purchases.

A new update

The Bank of Khartoum released a new version of its popular Bankak banking application for Android two days ago, in an effort to address widespread technical problems that have affected hundreds of thousands of customers inside and outside Sudan.

The new version includes bug fixes, although the bank does not specify in detail which problems have been addressed or which services have been repaired. Several customers, however, say that the application’s performance has not improved despite installing the update.

Dominance and risk

Economists, meanwhile, warn of the dangers inherent in Bankak’s dominance and the structural and economic risks that accompany it.

The dependence of an entire country’s daily economy on a single banking application creates a “central point of failure”, they argue. Any sudden outage or technical failure affecting the Bank of Khartoum’s servers can immediately bring buying, selling, and the payment of basic necessities to a near standstill.

Such concentration also weakens fair competition and reduces incentives for innovation among other banks, which have largely settled into secondary roles. Some, including Faisal Islamic Bank and Omdurman National Bank, possess substantial financial resources and could compete more aggressively if their digital services were restructured with greater ambition.

A more effective way to manage outages

In a related development, Major General of Police (Retired) Dr Essam al-Din Abbas, an information technology and data-analysis systems consultant, says that major outages should be treated as “operational incidents”, rather than as ordinary technical faults.

Modern banking systems have standard procedures for managing such incidents, he says, beginning with the activation of an incident-response plan and an assessment of the nature and scale of the problem.

The essential steps include determining the severity and impact of the incident, the number of customers affected, the services that have stopped working, whether customers’ money is secure, and whether the problem is confined to the user interface or extends to the central transaction system.

Immediate and transparent communication with the public is also crucial, he says.

“There is no need to disclose sensitive security details, but the customer has the right to know: what is the general nature of the outage? Which services are affected? Are funds and balances safe? What alternatives are available? And when is the next update on the situation expected?”

One necessary measure, he adds, is the creation of an official channel for updating customers on the status of services, rather than leaving citizens dependent on WhatsApp, Facebook, and rumours.

Building bridges between applications

Dr Abbas, the technology expert, also calls for bridges to be built between applications such as Bankak and Fawry, rather than allowing them to operate as isolated islands.

He questions the absence of an interoperable national payments system through which citizens could transfer money from one bank to another, from a bank to a digital wallet, from a wallet to a bank, and between different financial institutions, without the application used by either party becoming an obstacle to the transaction.

Sudan, he argues, should move from the idea that “I have a banking application that works” to a more resilient principle: “I have a national payments system that works even when a particular application fails.”

The technology expert says this would require five fundamental changes. The first is interoperability, requiring banking systems and payment-service providers to communicate and transact with one another. The second is the creation of a national payments gateway, acting as a connecting layer between banks, payment-service providers, electronic wallets, and telecommunications networks.

The third is disaster recovery, ensuring that no single point of failure can paralyse a national service. The fourth is incident management and public communication, through clear rules requiring financial institutions to inform customers of significant disruptions and provide regular updates.

The fifth is cybersecurity by design. Interoperability, Dr Abbas stresses, should not come at the expense of security.

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Note: This report has been translated from Arabic with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools, and subsequently reviewed and adapted by a human editor before publication.