“ We will continue to invest in emergent technologies like AI , ML and IoT wherever they have the potential to improve life for people as well as back office efficiency
“ We will continue to invest in emergent technologies like AI , ML and IoT wherever they have the potential to improve life for people as well as back office efficiency
— Vimal Kumar , Chief Executive : Retail & Business Banking , Customer Experience and Digital – Absa Regional Operations
because it ’ s customer-centric , meeting a need that is felt in all our markets . It helps us deliver banking capability at a very low cost to segments that are difficult to serve through the branch network .”
Importantly , it extends financial access , as Kumar explains . “ We want to make it easy for new customers to join the financial ecosystem . Wallet banking brings together a couple of cool things . One is that it helps us penetrate the mobile money ecosystem effectively ; it creates a partnership opportunity with other fintechs and with the mobile network operators – the kind of partnership that will be so important going forward . It also helps us onboard customers in a non-physical way so they can either use the self-KYC ( know your customer ) facility or onboard via an agent . They need never come into a branch .” Wallet banking , Kumar says , is an investment in the future , to be expanded and made more multifunctional .
Since Absa became independent , Kumar has become increasingly convinced that technology is more effectively and quickly implemented by involving partners than by building it in-house . “ We have an accelerator programme where we incubate up to 15 fintechs at any one point . We started working with some of those companies because they were building technologies specifically to solve customer problems in Africa . Our biggest success so far has been Jumo , which has built mass data and analytics , and credit assessment capability , working in Africa with mobile lending operators over the last eight years . It is very smart , it can onboard and assess customers , and lend to them based on a multivariate scorecard that ranks risk .”
151 fintechmagazine . com