JOHANNESBURG,
Sept. 22, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM
(NYSE:IBM) today announced that 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
aiming to broaden 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. As banks focus their
efforts on open innovation, security and high-value services,
hybrid cloud solutions have become increasingly important to
deliver seamless and secured digital banking experiences.
"Enterprises face unique challenges when it comes to balancing
innovation and regulatory compliance, especially those in highly
regulated industries like financial services," says Alan Peacock, General Manager, IBM Cloud. "For
decades, IBM has been fuelling the transformation of the financial
services industry, bringing IBM's industry experience and
leadership in security and data privacy to help banks address those
challenges and modernize, transform their operations and offer
innovation to their customers."
"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 can boost financial inclusion, IBM is working with
Africa's 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.
Attijariwafa bank, the Pan African Banking and Financial
Group, has adopted IBM hybrid cloud solutions to help advance the
digitisation of its banking operations, and more quickly bring new
digital services to its customers, all in a security-rich and
flexible environment. Using IBM Cloud Paks that are built on Red
Hat OpenShift, the bank can streamline and integrate front-and
back-office processes to modernise business and IT operations.
By deploying IBM Cloud Paks, Attijariwafa bank aims to modernise
and manage its core banking applications like its corporate banking
application, in a secured, integrated and scalable environment.
This can create richer and simpler customer interactions while
helping decrease the time to bring new offerings to market. It can
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 is designed to facilitate 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 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 designed to be
cost-effective as the bank takes its 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 and optimize customer data, while also
achieving goals like reducing infrastructure and maintenance costs.
With IBM Power and FlashStorage solutions, they now have an
infrastructure designed to improve insights on customer data, speed
query resolutions and time-to-market on new services across
channels – all backed by highly available, scalable, cloud-and
AI-ready technology.
Banco Mais, a 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 aimed 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 faster and deploy process application
solutions without the need to build the IT infrastructure. By
turning to this IBM Cloud solution, they developed, tested, ran and
monitored their business processes at a fraction of the time it
would otherwise have taken. As a result, Banco Mais reports that
they 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.
Pan-African bank Nedbank aims to deliver superior digital
experiences to its customers. To achieve this, the bank is
modernizing its core banking applications with a hybrid cloud
strategy and has turned to IBM to help bring digital products and
services to market. To take advantage of the flexibility and
agility offered by modern cloud technologies on this digitalization
journey, Nedbank explored a hybrid, multicloud approach, using the
IBM Garage methodology to implement IBM Cloud Pak for Integration
in order to integrate legacy systems. Through IBM Garage, the bank
was able to deep dive and explore fresh solutions and in a matter
of weeks achieved what would have taken them months. This has
enabled Nedbank to shift their legacy applications into the cloud
and integrate with other cloud-based applications as they modernize
and position for future innovation.
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, 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. As workloads
shift to the edge, IBM Cloud Satellite helps clients deliver low
latency, while still enabling them to have the same levels of
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
About Ecobank: https://ecobank.com/
About Attijariwafa Bank: www.attijariwafabank.com
About UBA: www.ubagroup.com
About Co-operative Bank of Kenya:
https://www.co-opbank.co.ke/
About Banco Mais: www.bancomais.co.mz
About Nedbank: www.nedbank.co.za
Contact:
Suzanne Cross
IBM Communications
Suzanne.cross@us.ibm.com
View original content to download
multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/banks-across-africa-turn-to-ibm-hybrid-cloud-and-ai-solutions-to-accelerate-digital-innovation-301383100.html
SOURCE IBM