The increasing demand for Electronic banking
received a boost recently at the Huawei financial services, pointing to
deeper investments by banks in techs, in order to be globally
competitive and remain resilient.
Bankers from Sub Saharan Africa and China
who attended the Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Financial Services Industry
Online Summit 2020 agree that digitisation of the sector will give it
resilience against the current Covid-19 pandemic and enable sustained
growth in the post COVID era.
The pan-African conference themed
“Accelerating Digital Transformation, Enable Business Growth Again” was
attended by 1200 delegates from across banks, telco operators, fintech,
and ICT services companies.
Opening the event, Liao Yong, vice
president of Huawei Southern Africa Region, said advances in ICT present
unique opportunities for the banking sector, especially when almost 70%
of the region’s population doesn’t have a bank account.
“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.” Liao said.
There
has been a rapid uptake of mobile technologies in the region with
strong economic growth in the past 2 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
behavioral 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. 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 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.
In
China, bucking the decline in Q1 GDP, the financial sector recorded a
6% year-on-year growth. Analysts attribute this growing to the sector’s
years of unremitting efforts in digital transformation.
Chen Kunte, former Chief Information
Officer of China Merchants Bank and current Chief Digital Transformation
Officer of Global Financial Services in Huawei’s Enterprise Business
Group said digitisation will give the banking sector the resilience it
needs in a public health crisis. Banking everywhere can’t come true
without leveraging cloud, AI, and Big Data.
“We 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,” Chen
said.
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.
According
to Alex Siboe Wekunda, head of DFS, KCB, said 97% of all transactions
are done digitally which leads to substantial growth during the
pandemic. Luckily enough, we had invested well in our platform, so we’re
able to handle the traffic that comes through this ecosystem. And
Joshua Oigara, CEO and MD, KCB Group PLC, said KCB will continue to
accelerate that investment beyond the just lending platforms, which has
been very successful.
Huawei works with over 1,000 financial
institutions globally, including 6 of the world’s top 10 banks in the
digital transformation voyage.
Liao concluded, “Our operations of over 20
years in Sub Saharan Africa enables us to think global and act locally
by providing our clients in the region with tailored-made solutions to
make digitisation process painless and smooth as if it is a tech company
that happens to work in the financial sector rather than as a bank that
tries to adopt disruptive technologies.”
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