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shared services group
As alrajhi bank kicked off the implementation of the new ‘harmonize the group’ strategy in 2024, its Shared Services Group continued to leverage the technology, infrastructure and expertise accrued to power the transition of the bank and its subsidiaries into a collective financial-services ecosystem. The year in review saw the Shared Services Group continue to enhance and automate their internal operations and processes in order to better service internal stakeholders, and strengthen its internal partnerships as the Shared Services Group works towards realising the vision of the bank’s overarching strategy.
Information technology
In a rapidly evolving market where technology remains a top differentiator in the banking sector, alrajhi bank’s foresight during the previous 2020-2023 strategy cycle led to a comprehensive transformation of the bank’s IT infrastructure. The strategic modernisation of core systems and technologies that powered the bank’s business verticals gave alrajhi bank the necessary competitive advantage, equipping itself to achieve the objectives of the new ‘harmonize the group’ strategy (2024-2026) launched this year.
During this reporting period, the IT Department leveraged its modernised infrastructure and worked towards achieving new, ambitious strategic objectives, heavily focusing on advancing the bank’s capabilities in Data, Digital, Cloud and AI. The new objectives, when executed accordingly, will support alrajhi group’s transformation into an ecosystem of financial solutions, thereby realising the overarching vision of ‘harmonize the group’. These objectives include:
Increasing centralisation and standardisation
Optimising and increasing the maturity level of IT infrastructure across the Al Rajhi Group; leading to improved response time, minimised complexity and reduced cost.
Achieving agile delivery through automation and efficiency
Improving operational efficiencies and providing faster turnaround time (TAT) to enhance customer satisfaction.
Creating Group-wide customer journeys and leveraging scale
Improving Group-wide synergies to provide a seamless digital customer journey through multiple product and service portfolios across the Group; accelerating speed-to-market and growing the Bank’s customer base.
Enhancing and maintaining regulatory compliance
Expand the coverage of fraud, AML, Security, and maintain a compliance-by-design approach to ensure an ‘always-compliant’ state to protect both bank and customers.
In order to achieve these objectives, the IT Department launched several strategic initiatives in 2024
Strategic Initiative
1
Establishing the ARB Quality Centre of Excellence
In order to leverage the IT capabilities accrued during the previous 2020-2023 strategy cycle, and to develop and deploy new competencies to keep pace with competitors and market needs, the IT Department brought together the collective IT capabilities from across the alrajhi group to establish a Centre of Excellence. This has enabled the bank to better extend its accrued IT expertise Group-wide, resulting in greater process optimisation and increased levels of automation across the alrajhi group.
Business process automation exceeded annual delivery targets, recording a 111% completion rate at the close of the reporting period. A total of 32 Group-wide processes were migrated or created within Atmaal – alrajhi’s centralised operations subsidiary, with streamlined and automated processes making way to greater operational efficiencies and significant economies of scale.
Greater interoperability across the group was enabled with a modern microservices platform built during the year in review. A total of 10 key applications were migrated onto the platform in 2024 (including eBusiness, Product Catalogue Engine, API Marketplace, Enterprise Middleware, and Drahim). The segmentation capability is in production to support the up/cross-sell strategy, with 90% of the Product Catalogue already complete.
Strategic Initiative
2
Advancing the cloud journey
To meet the bank’s strategic objective of increasing scale and agility via cloud, the IT team surpassed the 2024 strategic targets in its cloud journey with 109 cloud-ready applications delivered during the reporting period. With 60 more in the pipeline in non-production, the team had also reached 57% of its 2025 goal. As the Kingdom continues to promote and expedite cloud adoption, the IT team’s farsightedness in developing cloud-ready applications has enabled the bank to explore the benefits of scalability, agility, operational efficiency and cost savings as a result.
While advancing the bank’s cloud journey, the IT Department prioritised applications critical to business operations for early migration, to benefit from cloud scalability and reliability, while also mitigating any risks during migration such as data corruption, inconsistencies, and potential security vulnerabilities. Rigorous testing and security protocols were enforced to maintain system integrity throughout the transition.
Strategic Initiative
3
Implementing ServiceNow for centralised IT service management
The IT team successfully completed the managed services transition into a centralised operation during the reporting period, and implemented a dedicated and centralised IT Services Management (ITSM) function for the IT Department – ServiceNow.
By establishing the ServiceNow function, the IT Department was able to successfully reduce redundancies and improve cost efficiencies across IT operations, improving team productivity and IT asset management. As the group expanded on its digital services, automation tools were introduced in the deployment processes to help achieve greater agility while maintaining operational efficiencies. This resulted in faster turn-around times (TAT) and improved internal-stakeholder satisfaction, with the Department successfully maintaining high levels of system uptime.
Enhanced deployment success rate
Reaching a 99.7% success rate in deployed changes, ensuring system stability.
Exceptional system uptime
Maintaining an impressive 99.98% system availability.
Exceeded project delivery targets
Delivery speed increased by 2.5x from nearly 700 projects per year in 2023 to over 1,500 projects in 2024.
As the department centralised IT service management and standardised processes across the group, complexities arose in aligning diverse systems and operational practices. The IT team implemented a phased approach to the overall restructure in order to address this challenge, minimising any disruptions, while also ensuring a smooth, incremental transition for internal stakeholders. The architecture refresh for 2024 was also successfully completed, and was overseen by the group Technology Committee.
Strategic Initiative
4
Building a world-class data platform
Building a modern, scalable data platform to power the bank’s analytics and leverage emerging technologies remains a priority for the IT team during the new strategy cycle. The bank invested in a global industry-leading data platform to deliver an AI-enabled experience to ARB customers. The data platform consists of a range of functions from data transformation, visualisation, processing and storage, to governance and orchestration of data, ensuring the bank complies with the laws, regulations and standards required to safeguard the data of the bank as well as its customers.
Strategic Initiative
5
Creating a command centre for proactive incident management
Beyond the dedicated ITSM function mentioned above, the IT Department established a Command Centre for proactive incident management, to proactively eliminate any potential incidents causing major disruptions. The Command Centre focuses on preventing incidents rather than responding to them, improving overall efficiencies across the bank’s IT operations. Initial challenges in adapting to a broader real-time monitoring tool were addressed by developing Intelligent dashboards, thereby providing the IT team with immediate insights into system performance and enabling faster decision-making.
Strategic Initiative
6
Expanding the group-wide digital ecosystem
Digital transformation across the alrajhi group continued during the year in review; the IT Department offloaded mobile login data from the legacy mainframe, with the data replication resulting in significant advantages in both flexibility and cost reduction, alongside improved resilience. Over 200 Group-wide digital APIs were published to advance the objective of increasing customer-centric digital journeys group-wide. ARB expanded its digital ecosystem by enabling interoperability for 41 products (e.g. neotek Income Verification (GOSI), Fast Customer Onboarding, ARG Loyalty, Mutual funds, Takaful products), which allows for seamless integration with third-party services.
The IT Department continued its progress with the DigiCore initiative, deploying mortgage products and the migration of contract processing into the new system. Overall, more than one million contracts were active on the new technology stack at the close of the reporting period. The DigiCore programme is on track to complete Auto, Cards, and mortgage product implementations by year-end.
These strategic initiatives led by the IT Department in 2024 have yielded notable operational enhancements, underscoring the Bank’s commitment to operational excellence and customer-focused service. Key performance outputs achieved as a result during the reporting period include:
Increased transaction volume
Successfully processing over one billion transactions monthly, a 400% increase from 2019.
High mobile login activity
Recording over 380 million mobile logins monthly, a 550% increase since 2020. Of all mobile transactions, 65% were carried out using advanced mobile payment authentication methods such as MPIN, Touch ID, or Face ID.
Growth in instant payments
Achieving 18 million instant payment transactions per month.
Enhanced digital transaction rate
Increasing digital transactions to 95% of total transactions, compared to 50% in 2019, as part of ARB’s ongoing transformation (leading to the significant reduction in traditional branch, ATM, and IVR transactions, currently down to 5% of total transactions).
These achievements highlight the IT Department’s role in enabling Al Rajhi Bank to respond effectively to the increasing demands of a digital-first environment, transforming the Bank into a digitally-driven financial ecosystem, supporting long-term growth and operational resilience.
Capacity development
A number of training and development initiatives were delivered to the IT Department in 2024, among which 17 courses were dedicated to technical skill development, ensuring the IT team remained on a par with the latest and emerging tools and technologies. An additional 16 courses on compliance, regulatory requirements and risk management were also delivered to enhance the team’s overall understanding of Saudi Arabia’s rapidly evolving banking and regulatory environment. A total 403 individual employees benefited from these tailored training programmes during the reporting period.
Trainings conducted for the IT Department 2024
| Focus area | Description | Number of courses |
| Technical | Courses dedicated to technical skill development, to ensure employees stay up-to-date with the latest technologies and tools | 17 |
| Banking | Insights into the banking domain, to equip participants with industry knowledge | 2 |
| Compliance, Regulatory, and Risk Management | Courses designed to enhance the understanding of compliance, regulatory requirements and risk management | 16 |
| Management | Tailored courses to improve managerial skills and leadership competencies | 3 |
| Self-development | Courses to empower employees, enabling them to enhance their personal and professional development | 12 |
| Induction | Onboarding course for new employees | 1 |
These comprehensive training initiatives underscores the bank’s commitment to nurture a skilled and knowledgeable workforce, enhancing their competencies to contribute to the success and innovation of the bank.
Stringent adherence to regulatory compliance
As an ecosystem that is operating within a continuously and rapidly evolving multi-regulatory environment, the IT Department remains highly vigilant in terms of maintaining regulatory compliance and practicing good governance in IT. The Department abides by national regulations for data management and protection, complying with the National Data Management Office (NDMO) framework and Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL) at Group level, with PDPL phase 1 implementation successfully completed. The SAMA IT Governance Framework (ITGF) Assessment was also satisfactorily completed at the onset of 2024, with the centralised IT operation ensuring the bank meets the SAMA-regulated maturity level 3 for IT controls.
Security solutions were deployed group-wide, including Endpoint Protection (EPP and EDR), CyberArk, Enterprise Security Intelligence (Splunk), Threat Intelligence, Email Phishing protection, data monitoring, and Cloud security. Anti-fraud initiatives set up by the IT Department reduced fraudulent cases by 99% during the year in review, with additional fraud detection and prevention strategies put in place to further strengthen the bank’s internal controls.
Future outlook
In line with the 2024-2026 timeline of the ‘harmonize the group’ strategy, the IT Department has set clear strategic milestones and targets to be achieved over the next two years, structured into 34 key projects. The Department is on schedule to meet the annual objectives of 2025, having surpassed a number of annual targets at the close of this year.
Business continuity and crisis management
As alrajhi bank and its subsidiaries evolve into an ecosystem of greater scale and scope, the resilience of the business against expected challenges, as well as its adaptability to unexpected disruptions, becomes more vital. The bank’s approach to Business Continuity and Crisis Management (BCM) has been one of continuous improvement, since the approval of the first Business Continuity Policy at alrajhi in 2009. alrajhi bank has successfully overcome industry disruptions by drawing from years of preparedness, with robust plans, processes and people in place, leveraging intelligent tools and technologies to be agile and adapt in the face of unprecedented change.
In 2024, in line with the launch of the new ‘harmonize the group’ strategy, the bank focused on enhancing the roles, tasks, responsibilities, authority, scale and scope of the BCM function, transforming BCM capabilities to capture ‘Organisational Resilience’ as a whole, across the bank and its subsidiaries. As part of this development, the bank’s BCM and Crisis Management Policy was revised and updated during the reporting period, following a stringent evaluation by the Internal Audit Department and observations made by SAMA, ensuring ARB’s Policy framework remains effective, relevant, and well aligned with evolving risks. For the year in review, alrajhi bank maintained an average maturity level of 3.49 across 13 BCM domains, meeting SAMA regulations of 3 and above, and maintaining robust BCM capabilities and Disaster Recovery Systems.
Enhancing resilience through automation
Key among the updates for 2024 is the automation of the BCM function; By automating key business continuity functions, the group is now better equipped to keep pace with business growth and accommodate fundamental changes. Automation will reduce manual intervention, ensuring greater data accuracy. The BCM team automated incident response and management capabilities during the reporting period, greatly reducing risk of exposure by identifying real threats and responding rapidly to security incidents by launching immediate countermeasures. Detailed incident logs are automatically generated for further analysis.
As a result of the automation of the BCM function, ARB’s reports (namely the BIA – business impact analysis, TRA – threat risk assessment, and BCP – business continuity plans) have transitioned from traditional periodic reviews to dynamic reports that are generated to reflect significant real-time changes to the health and performance of the business, and its continuity plans. This capability enables decision-makers to make well-informed decisions. A mandatory periodic review is also conducted to ensure no more than 12 months pass without any developments.
Technical investments and infrastructure improvements have positively impacted the bank's Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) for products and services. The RTO for mobile and desktop technology was reduced to 30 minutes during the reporting period as a result. ARB achieved active-active capabilities for its technology, ensuring high availability of mission critical applications, while other mission critical apps were reconfigured with active-passive backup.
A Crisis Communications Team was established in 2023 to strengthen internal and external communication as part of strengthening the bank’s crisis management function. During the year in review, the Crisis Communications Team focused on managing effective and consistent communications to protect the reputation and credibility of the bank, and the trust placed in the bank by its stakeholders.
Bolstering readiness with testing, training and planning
The BCM, team conducted integrated simulation testing programmes in 2024, including tests on employee relocation, cybersecurity systems, and various technical tests for both the bank and its subsidiaries, to test their collective responsiveness to various types of business disruption scenarios. Week-long live tests were carried out in both January and September 2024; as ransomware continues to be one of the biggest and fastest growing cybersecurity threats for financial institutions, alrajhi bank tested and evaluated its ransomware readiness and recovery with a ransomware rehearsal. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack was also simulated to test the resilience of the group’s network resources and capacity to handle high volumes of traffic, while also identifying any weak points to implement better security measures.
Given the rise in supply chain disruptions during recent years, ARB strengthened its process to evaluate the business continuity capabilities of critical suppliers. Suppliers were actively involved in tests as needed, and continuity requirements were documented within their contracts, backed by acknowledgement of their ability to meet these requirements. The bank’s efforts to develop contingency plans have resulted in a strong database of suppliers meeting its expected compliance standards.
The bank also delivered specialised business continuity training programmes for employees across all levels of the group. Following the success of training simulations for primary members of the crisis management team during the previous financial year, the bank extended the training to deputy members of the team, to ensure the team is well equipped in crisis response. ARB also facilitated one-on-one awareness sessions for new team members, making several critical eLearning modules mandatory within the first three months of employment. workshops for response teams, and disseminated regular awareness messages across the group. A significant number of employees also obtained professional certificates in business continuity, better familiarising themselves of their roles and responsibilities, and critical business recovery actions.
Future outlook
In 2025, the BCM function will focus on further bolstering the resilience across Al Rajhi Group in a rapidly changing business landscape. Dependency mapping will be an area of focus as it becomes more sophisticated, improving decision-making with real-time information.
Supply chain management
GRI
204-1
The Procurement Transformation Project was successfully completed and closed during the year in review. The project was implemented with the aim to enhance the end-to-end procurement process for the bank and its subsidiaries, and has greatly improved service levels provided across the group via automation and other developments, successfully recording a service level delivery rate of 99.6% at the close of the year.
The Procurement Department continues to acquire the highest quality of goods and services at the best possible price by strengthening the competitive position maintained by alrajhi bank in the market. Mutually beneficial relationships are nurtured with top vendors to source goods and services in a timely manner to mitigate supply risks, and employ optimum contracting methods to protect the rights of both parties throughout the entire procurement process. In 2024, the Procurement Department recorded cost savings totalling to SAR 274.4 Mn., a significant 60.9% YoY increase.
The procurement department’s performance during the year in review (YoY)
SAR 274.4 Mn. Cost savings
151 Number of bids/tenders
1,830 Number of Purchase Orders (POs) issued
19,190 Number of Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) releases.
244 Number of contracts issued
| 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | |
| Total number of suppliers engaged | 301 | 340 | 384 | 335 | |
| Total procurement spending (SAR Bn.) | 4.5 | 4.2 | 3.7 | 3.1 | |
| Total number of local suppliers engaged | 205 | 263 | 285 | 261 | |
| Procurement spending on local suppliers (SAR Bn.) | 4.1 | 4.0 | 3.4 | 2.9 | |
| Percentage of spending on local suppliers (%) |
90 | 95 | 92 | 93 |
The bank’s Procurement Policy aligns with industry standards, and remains compliant with all internal regulatory requirements. It aims to minimise procurement-related risks and ensure that the process is conducted in a transparent and efficient manner, respecting ethical and fairness principles. The Policy safeguards alrajhi from challenges that may arise from last-minute contract changes, vendor negotiations, and late sourcing requests. Every team member involved in the procurement process on behalf of the bank is required to be familiar with this Policy and abide by it. The procurement team has been further equipped with knowledge on the bank’s Business Continuity and Crisis Management (BCM) function and Counter Fraud measures through awareness sessions held during the reporting period.
Empowering vendors through continuous engagement
The Online Procurement Portal continued to register vendors during the reporting period, taking the total of active vendors on the Portal up to 1,199.
Active vendors 2022, 2023, and 2024
2022
703
2023
937
2024
1,199
A number of new module enhancements were also carried out on the Portal during the year through the ‘Clarity’ feature, which automates procurement functions; these included the Contracts Module, Credit Note Tracking Module, and Contracts Dashboard Module that were implemented in 2024, further improving the overall procurement function.
The bank also prioritises sourcing from locally established businesses, with 94% of all vendor payments being made in local currency.
While it is a great strategy to cross-sell to vendors and make an ARB account a necessity, we are suggesting the narrative to be changed slightly as written here, to make it sound beneficial for the vendor instead of for the Bank.
Future outlook
The vision of the Procurement Department is to be a true value creator, a trusted and strategic partner for all internal stakeholders across Al Rajhi Bank and its subsidiaries, with a clear focus on delivering to their needs, and thereby contributing towards meeting the Group’s overarching objectives. In the near-term, the Department hopes to further enhance the planning of the sourcing process by integrating a supply chain sourcing module to the existing system.