6 Major African Banks Turn to IBM for Hybrid Cloud & AI
IBM today announced that 6 major financial institutions across Africa have selected the technology corporation for hybrid cloud and AI capabilities to promote digital innovation and continue developing digital-first solutions.
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.
With over 475 million Africans expected to be mobile internet users by 2025, digital and mobile play a critical role in facilitating the delivery of digital financial services to consumers who transact on their mobile phones.
“Enterprises, especially those in highly regulated industries like financial services, face unique challenges when it comes to balancing innovation and regulatory compliance,” says Alan Peacock, GM, IBM Cloud.
“For decades, IBM has been fuelling the transformation of the financial services industry, bringing IBM’s trusted industry experience and leadership in security and data privacy to help banks modernize, transform operations and drive innovation.”
Here are 6 African Banks that have partnered with IBM for Hybrid Cloud and AI solutions:
- 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 its 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.
- Nedbank
Nedbank, the Sandton-based lender which services customers across Africa, has set out to deliver superior digital experiences to customers. To achieve this, the bank is modernising its core banking applications with a hybrid cloud strategy and has partnered with IBM to help bring digital products and services to life.
To take advantage of the flexibility and agility offered by modern cloud technologies on this digitalisation journey, Nedbank explored a hybrid multi-cloud approach, adopted the IBM Garage methodology to implement IBM Cloud Pak for Integration.
Faced with the need to integrate complex legacy systems, Nedbank turned to IBM Cloud Pak for Integration to help build a simplified and standardised integration approach to their cloud strategy.
This enables Nedbank to shift their legacy applications into the cloud and integrate with other cloud-based applications they are consuming as they modernise and position for future innovation.
- Attijariwafa Bank
Another pan-African banking and financial group that has adopted IBM hybrid cloud solutions software to advance the digitisation of its banking operations, and quickly bring new digital services to its customers, all in a secure and flexible environment.
Using IBM Cloud Paks that are built on Red Hat OpenShift, the leading bank will streamline and better integrate front-and back-office processes and modernise business and IT operations.
By deploying IBM Cloud Paks, Attijariwafa Bank will modernise and manage its core banking applications like its corporate banking application, in a secure, integrated, and easily scalable environment.
- United Bank for Africa Plc (UBA)
Africa’s global bank operating in 23 countries globally 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, it 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 cost-effective taking the first step towards embracing a hybrid cloud model.
- Co-operative Bank of Kenya
The 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, optimize customer data, while also achieving goals like reducing infrastructure and maintenance costs. With IBM Power and FlashStorage solutions, they now derive improved insights on customer data, faster query resolutions, quicker time-to-market on new services across channels – all backed by high available, scalable, cloud-and AI-ready technology.
- Banco Mais
A leading bank in Mozambique, Banco Mais 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 needed 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 quickly and deploy process application solutions without the need to build the IT infrastructure.
By turning to this IBM Cloud solution, they could develop, test, run and monitor their business processes at a fraction of the time it would otherwise have taken. As a result, Banco Mais 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.
