Africa's leading banks including EcoBank, Nedbank, Attijariwafa Bank, United Bank of Africa, Co-operative Bank of Kenya and Banco Mais are tapping into IBM technologies to help advance financial inclusion across the continent

IBM (NYSE: IBM [1]) today announced that major financial institutions across Africa have selected hybrid cloud and AI capabilities from IBM to unlock digital innovation and continue their work to develop digital-first solutions, ultimately broadening access to financial services on the continent.

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 GSMA -The mobile economy sub-Saharan Africa 2020 [2], digital and mobile play a critical role in facilitating the delivery of digital financial services to consumers who transact on their mobile phones. As banks focus their efforts on open innovation, security and high-value services, hybrid cloud solutions have become increasingly important to deliver seamless and secure digital banking experiences.

"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, General Manager, 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."

According to IBM's COVID-19 future of business study [3], more than 59% of the organisations that participated said that the pandemic accelerated digital transformation, and more than 75% of responding executives indicated they expect changed customer behaviour to continue after COVID-19. As companies in the financial services sector are speeding up transformation, IBM hybrid cloud and AI solutions are supporting their drive to accelerate digitalisation in different parts of the continent.

"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 boost financial inclusion, IBM is working with Africa's leading 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.

Pan-African bank, Nedbank 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. Through IBM Garage, the bank was able to deep dive and explore fresh solutions and in a week achieved what would have taken them months. 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, the Pan African Banking and Financial Group, 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 to 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, on a secure, integrated and easily scalable environment. This will allow a rich and simple customer interaction while decreasing the time to bring new offerings to market. It will 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 facilitates 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 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, 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 cost-effective taking the 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, 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, 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.

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 [4], 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, delivering security, data privacy, interoperability and open standards found in hybrid cloud environments.

To learn more about IBM's insights and solutions for banks, insurers and other financial services providers, please visit: www.ibm.com/industries/financial-services [5]