This project was implemented through the 'Public-Private Secondments for SupTech Innovation' initiative between Central Bank of Egypt & Abhi Pvt Ltd.
Across many financial systems, consumer complaints represent one of the most critical but under-leveraged sources of supervisory intelligence. The Central Bank of Egypt (CBE), like many peer institutions, receives thousands of complaints from the public each year. However, these are often submitted in unstructured formats: handwritten letters, scanned images, PDFs, and forms in Arabic and English. Manually reviewing, classifying, and acting upon such data was time-consuming and prone to inconsistencies.
To overcome this challenge, the CBE decided to explore the use of AI technologies to automate the extraction and structuring of complaint data. Through the Public-Private Secondments for SupTech Innovation initiative, the University of Cambridge SupTech Lab and the World Economic Forum brought in a dedicated seconded team from Abhi, a fintech infrastructure company based in Pakistan. The team included experts in OCR, natural language processing, and large language models, who collaborated directly with CBE’s supervision and IT departments.
Aligned with CBE's broader digital transformation strategy, the project’s objective was to co-design and deliver a working prototype capable of:
The Public-Private Secondments for SupTech Innovation initiative pairs highly trained experts from the private sector with financial authorities around the world for short-term, remote and in-person secondments that accelerate the digital transformation of financial supervision, leading to a more efficient, safer and sounder global financial system.
