Bankers from Sub Saharan Africa and China who attended the Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Financial Services Industry Online Summit 2020 agree that digitization of the sector will give it resilience against the current Covid-19 pandemic and enable sustained growth in the post-Covid-19 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 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 we can unleash the power, depends on how much and how soon 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 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 in this is likely to accelerate a multi-decade trend we've already seen towards digitization. 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 the 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 digitization 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 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 to accelerate that investment beyond the just lending platform, 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 the digitization 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 adapt disruptive technologies.”