Financial services providers must use AI and ML to upgrade their services and remain relevant to increasingly tech-savvy and tech-empowered digital consumers.
This is one of the take-outs from the Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit 2023, hosted in Cape Town this week.
The Chinese multinational used the event to launch its 'Non Stop Banking’ initiative, which calls for collaboration between the ICT and banking industries. Huawei believes African banks must leverage advancement in mobile banking and fast-track full digitalisation to compete in the broader fintech market.
Leo Chen, president of Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa, said in his keynote this digitalisation involves the successful fusion of bank processes and ICT, now mandatory for any credible financial services provider.
“Going digital is an imperative for the banking industry,” said Chen.
Jason Cao, CEO, Huawei Global Digital Finance, said the industry has to change from being predominantly transaction-based to being digitally engaged.
We are now in the era of 4.0 banking or real-time embedded banking.
Brett King, futurist and and author.
Also presenting at the Summit, Brett King, Australian futurist and author of the book "Bank 4.0", underlined the urgency with which Africa has to approach this mobile-driven change, with the assertion that by 2030 most financial institutions will be technology companies.
This pressure to evolve is fuelled by post-COVID economic recovery, change in consumer behaviour and a fintech market flooded by solutions and services from non-bank entities.
According to King, the bank account of the world is the smartphone. King said by 2025, credit card or debit cards transactions will account for just 30% of global commerce.
“We are now in the era of 4.0 banking or real-time embedded banking,” he said.
Speeed of trust
During a roundtable discussion at the Summit, Eric Muriuki Njagi, group director of dgital business at Kenya''s NCBA Bank, said for African banks to digitally transform and embrace the concept of “moving money at the speed of trust”, they must ensure trust is built into their systems – they have to prove the security and reliability of platforms as a trustworthy means of facilitating transactions, and compliance with regulation.
Njagi said the continent must invest in skills development, especially to develop technology engineers as these skills are a pre-requisite for fintech businesses to become digital-first.
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