Agent banking pushes financial services to a shopfront in a village. That changes the engineering problem entirely: the terminal is a low-end device, the network is unreliable, and the person operating it is a shopkeeper, not a teller.
Constraints that shape the build
Every transaction must reconcile. A cash-in that succeeds at the agent and fails at the core banking system is a customer who has handed over money for nothing. Idempotency and settlement reconciliation are the heart of the design.
Identity has to work offline-ish. Biometric capture and verification paths are built for intermittent connectivity, with clear, unambiguous states — never an ambiguous "maybe completed".
Float is an operational problem. An agent out of cash is an outage. We forecast liquidity needs and alert before the agent runs dry.
Compliance is continuous. AML thresholds, suspicious transaction reporting and central bank returns are generated from the transaction ledger, not assembled by hand at month end.