Home | Business | BANKS URGED TO GO DIGITAL POST COVID-19

BANKS URGED TO GO DIGITAL POST COVID-19

Font size: Decrease font Enlarge font

MBABANE - Bankers from Sub Saharan Africa and China have agreed that digitisation of the sector will enable sustained growth in the post Covid-19 era.
This was an agreement reached in the Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Financial Services Industry Online Summit 2020 in the past week.


The pan-African conference themed, ‘Accelerating Digital Transformation, Enable Business Growth Again’ was attended by 1 200 delegates from across banks, telco operators, fintech and ICT services companies.
Eswatini is also in Sub-Saharan Africa and local banks have upped their game regarding online presence since the country recorded its first COVID-19 case back in March.


Opening the event, Liao Yong, vice president of Huawei Southern Africa Region, said advances in ICT were presenting unique opportunities for the banking sector, especially when almost 70 per cent of the region’s population did not have a bank account.


Advances


“All of these ICT advances will be critical enablers to a thriving banking sector in Sub Saharan Africa. As we can see, the merging of these two curves of ICT and banking services is powerful. But how much we can unleash the power, depends on how much and how soon the banking sector goes digital,” Yong said.
Reports suggest there has been a rapid uptake of mobile technologies in the region with strong economic growth in the past two decades.


According to statistics by GSMA, 4G, mobile broadband technology, adoption will overtake 2G in 2023 and the total of unique subscribers in Sub Saharan Africa will reach 600 million by 2025, representing half the region’s population.


Speaking at the online event, Brett King, author of Bank 4.0, a New York-based mobile banking startup, said the behavioural changes that come with coronavirus further underpin the needs for digital transformation in the banking sector.
“The declining use of physical branches is likely for many customers to remain a permanent feature of their lives. The reality is this is likely to accelerate a multi-decade trend we’ve already seen towards digitisation.


new


“So when we look at the architecture of banking moving forward and the real elements that have been accelerated during the coronavirus period, you can see that that shift to digital is creating a much more aligned, some digital experience. This basically brings us to a new model of banking…we moved to this low friction banking embedded in the world around us,” said King.


it was stated that there was a need to restructure banks’ ICT platforms from legacy architecture to cloud-based, open architecture by building AI-Powered and Data-Driven platforms to expand the way financial institutions engage and interact with their customers, and accommodate more innovative business models and service scenarios.


Banks from the region shared some case studies on digitisation in banking services in the region.
Lucille De Kock, Head of Data Analysis and Product Management at FNB, South Africa, introduced FNB’s fundamental shifts across all dimensions to transform the bank into a helpful, trusted and people centric money manager leveraging digital and data platforms. No immediate reaction could be sourced from Eswatini Bankers Association at the time of compiling this report.

Comments (0 posted):

Post your comment comment

Please enter the code you see in the image: