Monday, December 9African Digital Business Magazine

Tag: digitalisation

Fintech

Digitisation as Africa’s Great Equaliser in Financial Services

By Saviour Chibiya, Chief Executive of Absa Regional Operations (ARO) Access to financial services in Africa had for decades been defined by disparities—between rural and urban areas, between men and women, between small businesses and larger enterprises. It meant that millions, especially the continent’s most vulnerable populations, were excluded from the formal economy, curbing entrepreneurship, restricting access to credit, and stifling upward financial mobility for far too long.  But by the turn of the millennium, change was afoot.  Early web pioneers like Ghanaian professor Nii Quaynor, often hailed as "Africa’s father of the internet", were busy laying the groundwork for the continent's foundational online infrastructure. In 1994, Quaynor introduced Ghana’s first internet service ...
South Africa News

SMEs of Tomorrow – Tips to Drive Growth in 2022

Employing over half the workforce, driving significant growth in the private sector, and representing some 98% of all businesses, SMEs are the lifeblood of the South African economy. Experts speculate that Digital Transformation, COVID-19 awareness, shifting supply-chain trends, and operational optimisations, are among the key areas where SMEs can drive improvements, and thrive in 2022. Tom Stuart, Chief Marketing Officer of SME services provider Lulalend, says that having already commenced some level of digitisation pre-COVID, many SMEs are now looking to complete their DT in earnest. “These businesses are implementing expanded digital marketing tools, decentralised remote work, e-commerce capabilities, cloud-based data centres, and improved cyber-security measures,” Stuart explains. H...
South Africa News, Tech

Digital identity is a crucial business requirement post-Covid

It is well-known that the Covid-pandemic has forced change in many industries and driven digitalisation at a pace faster than anyone could have anticipated, but it has happened at the cost of robust security and digital authentication. The ramifications of this could be felt soon as it becomes increasingly difficult to know whether the person on the other end of a digital transaction is legitimate and authenticated. Juniper Research in its 2020-2025 Digital Identity Market Summary estimates that digital identity apps will exceed 6,2 billion by 2025 from a 2020 base of 1 billion. South Africa, together with most other countries, is on an aggressive growth path towards digital authentication and digital recognition maturity. Entrepreneur and digital, remote biometric authentication ...
Tech

New study reveals how digital technologies are shaping the global recovery

Latest Network Readiness Index ranks world’s most ‘network ready’ markets The latest results and rankings of the Network Readiness Index (NRI) were released today by the Portulans Institute, revealing how countries around the world are leveraging information technologies to emerge from the COVID pandemic and become ‘network ready’. This latest edition – the third compiled by the Portulans Institute since taking over the Index from the World Economic Forum in 2019 – ranks a total of 130 global economies based on their performance across 60 variables. STL, the industry leading integrator of digital networks, is the NRI’s official knowledge partner. The findings are included in a new report published this month, ‘Shaping the Global Recovery: How digital technologies can help make the post-C...
Fintech, South Africa News

How business can harness the power of blockchain

By Andrea Tucker, Head of Research & Development and Strategic Projects at fintech specialist e4 In today’s digital world, where faxes have all but been replaced by email and landlines by smartphones, doesn’t it seem strange that we’re still signing contracts in person? That we’re driving hours to do so, creating mountains of paper trails, and storing them in lever arch files to gather dust, when the technology exists to eliminate this physical burden? Blockchain has been proven to solve this problem, yet its business adoption has been slow. The technology at the heart of bitcoin and other virtual currencies, blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. It’s time for the way we do admini...
Fintech

New case study on digitalisation of financial service providers to serve low-income customers

This new publication explores the answers to the question: How best to digitalise a financial institution? The case study draws upon management consulting literature to assess digitalisation strategies in a pragmatic way. It assesses three leading African financial organisations against this framework: Al Barid Bank, Morocco; Equity Bank, Kenya; and Consolidated Bank, Ghana. The World Savings and Retail Banking Institute (WSBI)’s programme for financial inclusion, Scale2Save, launched today ‘A case study on connecting with low-income customers through digitalisation’, part of its State of the Savings and Retail Banking Sector in Africa research series. Digitalisation is revolutionising the way financial service providers conduct their business. In Africa, the spread of mobile phones over...
Golden age of tech coming, but scores of jobs at risk, says futurist
Business, Tech

Golden age of tech coming, but scores of jobs at risk, says futurist

Smart connected machines are set to put both blue collar and white collar workers out of jobs in large numbers, and this wave of change will force paradigm shifts in education, work and society as a whole. So says Sean Culey Business transformation expert, futurist and author of ‘Transition Point: From Steam to the Singularity’, who was speaking during a webinar hosted by the Institute of Information Technology Professionals South Africa (IITPSA) special interest group on AI and Robotics and the special interest group’s chairperson, Johan Steyn, a technologist and management consultant. Culey, whose book took over five years to research and covers a number of similar waves of industrialisation and economic and societal change over the past 1,000 years, says the world is now in a transition...
SMMEs primed for growth as economy slowly takes steps to recover
African News, South Africa News

SMMEs primed for growth as economy slowly takes steps to recover

While South Africa’s economy took a series of blows over the last year, business owners remain confident that things will slowly start to stabilise in 2021. This was reaffirmed with South Africa's SACCI business confidence index rising to 93.4 in November of 2020 from 92 in October, above pre-pandemic levels. According to Trevor Gosling, Co-founder and CEO of Lulalend, a large part of the country’s growth this year will be dependent on SMMEs. “Despite the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the remarkable ability of these businesses to adapt to change has helped them evolve and ultimately survive. Companies were resilient, optimistic and innovative, trusting that, although the situation will not improve considerably in 2021, it will be able to at least start stabilizing.” Gosling says that t...
Fintech

Bill Payment Trends in 2021

Of all the technology sectors to have prospered amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the online payment space has emerged as one of the most influential, following the call for social distancing and demand for contactless payment solutions. “In fact, the Global Payments Report for 2020 published by McKinsey & Co. found that the digital payments sector experienced half a decade’s worth of growth and development in just a few months[i],” explains Andrew Hardie, Chief Executive Officer at Pay@ - a leading payment aggregator and provider of secure payment solutions. “Both in South Africa and abroad, this coincided with a significant increase in the use of online payment gateways and platforms for businesses and consumers alike who were looking to stay safe while socially distancing.” Yet, looking a...
How Fintech can help secure the world from the economic impact of viral pandemics
Fintech, Interview, Main, Nigeria News

How Fintech can help secure the world from the economic impact of viral pandemics

The coronavirus pandemic continues to turn the world and our lives upside down, with the outbreak forcing governments to put into place measures that reduce the risk of contamination, and focus on pre-emptive processes.  The strain on the economy is palpable, and is an impending catastrophe that could exceed the crash of 2008, and the Great Depression a century ago, if left unchecked. Besides asking people to practice social distancing and enforcing lockdowns to avoid the spread of the contagion, governments have another source of contamination they need to worry about: banknotes. The latest Fintech innovations can help mitigate the risk of transmission of the virus, by reducing the need to use physical money. Viruses and pathogens are known to live on surfaces for up to 48 hours. Some res...