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Banking sector urged to go digital to build sustainable growth post COVID-19

Liao Yong is the vice-president of Huawei Southern Africa Region. (Image source: Huawei Enterprise)

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 per cent of the region’s population don’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 banking sector goes digital.” Liao added.

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 underpins the needs for digital transformation in 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.

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, 97 per cent of all transactions are done digitally which lead 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 accelerate that investment beyond just lending platform, which has been very successful.

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