Banking sector urged to go digital to build resilience in post Covid-19 era

Liao Yong, vice president of Huawei Southern Africa Region

What you need to know:

 The pan-African conference themed ‘Accelerating Digital Transformation, Enable Business Growth Again’ was attended by 1200 delegates from across banks, telco operators, Fintech and ICT services companies.

Johannesburg. Digitization of the banking sector will give it resilience against the current pandemic and enable sustained growth in the post Covid-19 eram bankers from Sub Saharan Africa and China who attended the Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Financial Services Industry Online Summit 2020 have agreed.

 The pan-African conference themed ‘Accelerating Digital Transformation, Enable Business Growth Again’ was attended by 1200 delegates from across banks, telco operators, Fintech and ICT services companies. 

 Opening the event, Liao Yong, vice president of Huawei Southern Africa Region, said advances in ICT presents unique opportunities for the banking sector, especially when almost 70 per cent of the region’s population don’t have a bank account. 

 “All of these ICT advances will be critical enablers to a thriving banking sector in Sub Saharan Africa. As we can see, the merging of these two curves of ICT and banking services is powerful. But how much we can unleash the power, depends on how much and how soon banking sector goes digital,” Liao said.

 He added: We need to restructure banks’ ICT platforms from legacy architecture to cloud-based, open architecture by building AI-Powered and data-driven platforms to expand the way financial institutions engage and interact with their customers, and accommodate more innovative business models and service scenarios.