Backbase (www.Backbase.com), the leader in AI-powered banking, in partnership with African Banker magazine, has published The State of AI in African Banking 2026: The Reality of Banking in the Agentic Era. The report, the first systematic assessment of the return on investment of AI in African banking, finds that the continent's banking sector remains firmly committed to AI, but is entering a harder-nosed "accountability phase" in which boards are demanding evidence that the technology is paying for itself.

Drawing on responses from 277 senior banking executives across 37 African nations, the survey finds that foreign-exchange pressures, rising dollar-denominated cloud costs and tightening data-localisation rules are concentrating board minds on a single question: ROI or no AI?

Key findings from the report include:

• AI budgets are growing across the continent even among the third of institutions that have yet to establish formal ROI measurement, pointing to an investment imperative that is outpacing the means to account for it.
• Institutions working with third-party AI vendors measure returns at more than twice the rate of those building entirely in-house, at 71.7% versus 31%, a gap the report calls the "partner premium."
• Conversational AI has become the sector's default entry point, cited by 49% of respondents as a use case, but Innovators deploy advanced financial services capabilities, such as credit, risk and revenue tools, at a rate 24 percentage points higher than Early Adopters.
• Legacy architecture is the sector's single biggest constraint: 50.2% of respondents identify integration with existing systems as their primary internal obstacle, the same constraint that degrades the data coherence required to measure AI's return.
• Among institutions that have established formal ROI measurement, 85.1% report that results meet or exceed their original projections, yet only 67.1% of all respondents measure ROI at all.

The report also finds that sentiment about AI's role in African banking remains strongly positive, with 86.9% of respondents positive or very positive about its role over the next two years, and 83.2% likely or very likely to increase AI investment. Fraud detection and transaction monitoring emerged as the most impactful use case, followed by credit scoring and alternative assessment for thin-file customers, an application the report identifies as a credible route to bringing more of Sub-Saharan Africa's unbanked population into the formal financial system.

The report warns, however, that architectural debt is capping the sector's ambitions. On average, 55.7 cents of every IT dollar spent by African banks goes toward maintaining legacy systems, even as nearly half of respondents rate those same systems as highly or fully capable of supporting AI, a gap the report identifies as a potential blind spot as banks move toward autonomous, agentic AI.

Aymen Daoud, Regional Vice President Africa at Backbase, commented: "African banks don't have an AI problem, they have an architecture problem. The institutions that treat integration as the plumbing to fix before scaling agents will spend less, comply more easily, and be the ones still standing when the current generation of models is, inevitably, replaced by the next."

The full report is now available at https://apo-opa.co/4pvDDTr