Absa Regional Operations (ARO) digital transformation Qorus Banking Innovation Awards 2021

Absa Regional Operations (ARO) Absa is a leading African financial services group, inspired by the continent and the people it serves. Separation from Barclays constituted one of the largest and most complex ever attempted in the banking sector, and has allowed Absa to become a self-sufficient bank of the future, enabling it to own and control its systems, processes and infrastructure across the continent to best serve the needs of its customers. Today, the Absa Group Limited is listed on the JSE and is one of Africa’s largest diversified financial services groups, with a presence in 12 countries across the continent. This division, known as Absa Regional Operations (ARO), comprises majority stakes in banks in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, the Seychelles, Tanzania (Absa Bank in Tanzania and National Bank of Commerce), Uganda and Zambia, and has representative offices in Namibia and Nigeria. ARO has collaborated with a range of innovative partners to provide customised digital solutions such as technology platform provider JUMO and a mobile network operator (MNO) MTN to provide loans via mobile in Zambia and Ghana, to the largely unserved and underserved customers. Through these products, many customers who would not have had access to finance because of thin credit files and were unable to save due to onerous on-boarding requirements, can now formerly borrow money. This has contributed to a significant uplift in driving financial inclusion across Africa. ARO is a digital-first organisation, constantly seeking to drive digital innovation for the benefit of its customers. Innovations have included a more responsive mobile banking platform, a business banking app offering, and a conversational AI ChatBot, along with other ChatBanking products. ARO also designed and deployed its customised Customer 360 data analytics platform, which is able to convert data into customer acumen. This not only promotes data-driven decision making, but also places the customer at the core of our design. ARO has in the region of two million customers across our African markets. However, the ability to aggregate and analyse data in order to facilitate swift and accurate decision-making, has been limited. Our C360 data analytics platform has transformed the way Absa anticipates the changing needs of its customers through predictive modelling and other data science approaches. Absa's strategic transformation of payments across the African continent is radically improving our colleague and customer experience by providing standardized and scalable payment rails upon which innovative channel and product propositions are being developed and launched. We are passionate about driving automated payment platforms that are compliant with regulations and integrate core banking functionality within the payments processing system for better customer service. Our focus on digital experiences has resulted in increased New to Bank customers, retention of existing customers and has reduced customer complaints due to efficiencies created that also enables colleagues to focus on providing the best service possible to clients through significant reduction in manual interventions required. Absa's decision to invest in a strategic payments engine is focused on digital and automation whilst building a set of capabilities which will seamlessly connect customers to various payment types and schemes. The eco-system that is required to bring about finality for a payment order requires the customer, bank, service providers and central banks to be aligned, which is a key milestone achieved whilst also promoting and designing digitization programs, automation, and analysis-driven decisions to reimagine scalability or the realignment of products and services to strengthen our Brand in the market. Absa wants to transform itself into a digital bank by enabling release of products and functionalities faster. Absa moved from a business-led approach to a technology-led approach by adopting a services based architecture. This new microservices platform will provide integration of Retail and corporate banking. Absa has replaced its legacy middleware with microservices architecture aligned middleware which will allow Absa to expose open APIs in a secured manner to both internal and external consumers. Adoption of BIAN industry standards further enables Absa to plug and play of different core banking systems in future for different countries and still have uniform decoupling layer across all these coutries optimising the effort and cost to support and maintain the common middleware. More importantly, it makes it possible for Absa to introduce newer capabilities by strangulating the existing core banking systems without impacting the channels utilising the new channel. Absa has already onboarded its new Whatsapp banking channel using this new middleware.