COVID-19 continues to accelerate the already rapid changes
that were happening across the financial services sector in Africa,
fast-tracking the adoption of digital technologies to boost financial
inclusion. As banks focus their efforts on open innovation, security and
high-value services, hybrid cloud solutions have become increasingly important
to deliver seamless and secured digital banking experiences.
"Enterprises face unique challenges when it comes to
balancing innovation and regulatory compliance, especially those in highly
regulated industries like financial services," says Alan Peacock, General
Manager, IBM Cloud. "For decades, IBM has been fuelling the transformation
of the financial services industry, bringing IBM's industry experience and
leadership in security and data privacy to help banks address those challenges
and modernize, transform their operations and offer innovation to their
customers."
"In the past year we have seen banks navigate changes
brought on by a growing preference for digital and mobile solutions, increasing
smartphone penetration and the demand for convenience, innovation, and
simplicity from today's modern consumer," says Angela Kyerematen-Jimoh,
Regional, General Manager for IBM North, East and West Africa. "As banks
across the continent take advantage of the opportunity to provide digital
financial services which can boost financial inclusion, IBM is working with
Africa's financial groups to deliver intelligent, cloud-based, digital-first
innovation through IBM's hybrid cloud and AI capabilities."
Ecobank, the pan-African banking conglomerate with banking
operations in 33 African countries, has adopted a hybrid cloud approach to
extend its reach to millions across Africa. Using IBM Cloud, Ecobank migrated
their flagship mobile banking application to leverage the on-demand capacity of
resources that can support sudden spikes in traffic on its mobile banking
services. Ecobank also has access to other IBM cloud services that can be used
to develop more innovative, digital-first solutions to enhance their own client
experience.
With over 12 million customers on its flagship mobile
application, Ecobank is on an accelerated digital banking transformation
journey and is set out to expand its digital offerings and grow the 30 million
digital transactions it already processes on its platforms. As part of this
journey, the Pan-African banking conglomerate has built scalable business
solutions which allow for ease of integration with third-party providers using
their open digital banking platform for a growing customer base.
Attijariwafa bank, the Pan African Banking and Financial
Group, has adopted IBM hybrid cloud solutions to help advance the digitisation
of its banking operations, and more quickly bring new digital services to its
customers, all in a security-rich and flexible environment. Using IBM Cloud
Paks that are built on Red Hat OpenShift, the bank can streamline and integrate
front-and back-office processes to modernise business and IT operations.
By deploying IBM Cloud Paks, Attijariwafa bank aims to
modernise and manage its core banking applications like its corporate banking
application, in a secured, integrated and scalable environment. This can create
richer and simpler customer interactions while helping decrease the time to
bring new offerings to market. It can also enable the banks' employees to focus
their effort and time on serving their customers better.
This collaboration with IBM supports the digital
transformation strategy of the bank and is designed to facilitate a full
modernisation of the bank's operations in an open, hybrid cloud environment.
United Bank for Africa Plc (UBA), Africa's global bank
operating in 23 countries and with headquarters in Nigeria, has set a goal to
grow its transaction volume significantly over the next few years and to deepen
retail market penetration. To achieve this, they would be required to attract
the unbanked, acquire new customers through digital banking and retain existing
customers by adopting a "No Transaction Must Fail (NTMF)" initiative.
Using IBM POWER9-based servers, Flash system storage and IBM
PowerVC (Power system virtualization & cloud management), UBA set up a
scalable, private cloud environment that is designed to be cost-effective as
the bank takes its first step towards embracing a hybrid cloud model.
Customers' needs are evolving as they seek banking services
across channels and expect personalization. Co-operative Bank of Kenya turned
to IBM to modernize their core banking platform and reach their customers on
different channels including mobile and online while offering customized
services driven by insights. For this, they required a technology that would
also empower their employees who work across teams to simplify processes and
optimize customer data, while also achieving goals like reducing infrastructure
and maintenance costs. With IBM Power and FlashStorage solutions, they now have
an infrastructure designed to improve insights on customer data, speed query
resolutions and time-to-market on new services across channels – all backed by
highly available, scalable, cloud-and AI-ready technology.
Banco Mais, a bank in Mozambique, turned to IBM to help
streamline its business processes and reduce turnaround times for
customer-facing services. In the face of a growing competitive market locally,
Banco Mais aimed to develop financial service products faster to retain and
gain market share. Banco Mais implemented IBM Business Process Manager on Cloud
service and was able to start projects faster and deploy process application
solutions without the need to build the IT infrastructure. By turning to this
IBM Cloud solution, they developed, tested, ran and monitored their business
processes at a fraction of the time it would otherwise have taken. As a result,
Banco Mais reports that they reduced turnaround time for loans by 60% and
decreased the time it took to implement services that took 3 to 4 months by 85%
to improve customer experiences.
Pan-African bank Nedbank aims to deliver superior digital
experiences to its customers. To achieve this, the bank is modernizing its core
banking applications with a hybrid cloud strategy and has turned to IBM to help
bring digital products and services to market. To take advantage of the
flexibility and agility offered by modern cloud technologies on this digitalization
journey, Nedbank explored a hybrid, multicloud approach, using the IBM Garage
methodology to implement IBM Cloud Pak for Integration in order to integrate
legacy systems. Through IBM Garage, the bank was able to deep dive and explore
fresh solutions and in a matter of weeks achieved what would have taken them
months. This has enabled Nedbank to shift their legacy applications into the
cloud and integrate with other cloud-based applications as they modernize and
position for future innovation.
Earlier this year, IBM announced the general availability of the industry's first financial services-ready cloud platform, IBM Cloud for Financial Services, as well IBM Cloud Satellite. First revealed in 2019, the IBM Cloud for Financial Services is designed to help reduce risk for financial institutions, their partners and FinTechs, and innovate quickly with built-in controls that are adhered to by the entire ecosystem. IBM Cloud Satellite brings a secured, unifying layer of cloud services for clients across environments, regardless of where their data resides. As workloads shift to the edge, IBM Cloud Satellite helps clients deliver low latency, while still enabling them to have the same levels of security, data privacy, interoperability and open standards found in hybrid cloud environments.