How tbi bank Managed Bulgaria’s Currency Transition with Real-Time Communications

tbi bank, a digital challenger bank operating in Bulgaria, Romania and Greece, recently faced an operational challenge during Bulgaria’s currency transition from the Bulgarian Lev (BGN) to the Euro (EUR). The bank’s team had to ensure that tens of thousands of customer communications were updated overnight, while handling millions of different value combinations across multiple channels and customer journeys.

The main complexity was not the currency change itself, but how monetary values needed to be displayed:

• In 2025: values had to be shown as BGN (EUR)

• In 2026: values had to be shown as EUR (BGN)

To accomplish this, tbi bank carefully coordinated updates across push notifications, Viber, SMS, email, and in-app messaging, relying on Evam’s real-time engagement layer to execute the transformations safely without touching core banking systems or data sources.

Evam supports real-time ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) operations, which allowed tbi to:

• Transform currency values dynamically

• Apply correct formatting based on year and regulatory requirements

• Keep all existing data sources, integrations, and events unchanged

This approach enabled tbi to update communications quickly and safely without introducing risk into core banking systems.

The currency transition affected several high-frequency customer journeys, including:

• Onboarding in its Super app 

• Neon card tokenization

• Cash and shopping limits

• Loan and current account top-ups

• Utility payments

• Deposit and savings account balance updates

• P2P transfers

• In-app Shopping and checkout

Through careful planning, team coordination, and the capabilities of Evam’s engagement layer, tbi bank ensured that the transition ran smoothly, with all customer journeys updated accurately and without disruption.

Igor Shumytskyi, Head of Reengagement Campaign Engineering, tbi bank

“Tens of thousands of communications had to be switched from Bulgarian Leva to Euro overnight. The complexity was in millions of value combinations needed to be displayed across communication channels and customer journeys. Evam allowed us to handle this at the engagement layer, without changing our data sources or events, helping make the euro transition seamless for both our team and Bulgarian customers” 

This case demonstrates that regulatory and market changes do not always require full re-integration with core systems - effective planning and the right engagement tools allow banks like tbi to execute complex transitions efficiently and reliably.