The banking sector is set for a tidal wave of innovation as the adoption of a broad range of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions accelerates in the years ahead, supported by the growing power and scalability of the cloud.

The strategic use of AI is nothing new to the banking sector. Due to the data, processes and tech-intensive operations typical of the industry, banks have leveraged AI and machine learning to improve data classification and process automation, as well as uncover hidden patterns and predicting events, which is particularly useful in governance and compliance efforts.

The global banking, finance and insurance accounts for an聽, second only to the ICT sector. This adoption is only set to grow as Generative AI is deployed to a broad range of use cases.

The new wave of generative AI promises new advances in employee productivity, system efficiencies, and innovation. The impacts of this innovation will likely be seen in critical areas including greater differentiation, improved financial performance, and enhanced risk management capabilities.

For banks, continued success and growth may depend on how effectively they leverage the power of business AI and the scalability of the cloud to power innovation.

AI powering strategic decision-making

One of the highest-value areas of AI-powered banking innovation is in improved strategic decision-making, especially at a CFO level.

In a banking and financial services context, the strategic role of the CFO is critical to the company’s performance and its ability to both identify and adapt to emerging risks and opportunities.

To fulfil this strategic role, CFOs need access to accurate, real-time information about the performance of the business at every level of granularity, enabled by powerful modern data management technologies. However, this level of real-time insights has not been available to CFOs at the speed at which the business moves, affecting strategic decision-making.

The introduction of business AI is set to revolutionise the strategic role of the CFO by automating manually intensive tasks to free up time and resources for strategic initiatives, improving reporting accuracy, and mitigating risks related to fraud through improved anomaly detection and prevention.

A recent survey by IDC聽found that CFOs expect AI to dramatically improve the performance of their finance functions, ranging from payments and expense management to financial close, forecasting, budgeting and planning. The report highlights the role of AI to enable CFOs to predict and model complex business scenarios in real time, using AI-powered insights to draw on historic patterns as well as capture and adjust to business events as they happen.

However, the success of business AI depends on the quality and relevance of the data it ingests. Here, the role of business technology platforms leveraging the cloud become indispensable to banks’ efforts at adopting AI for innovation and decision-making.

Cloud provides platform for banking innovation

Banks are in a perpetual state of innovation to meet changing customer needs, adapt to regulatory changes, and design and deliver new banking products and customer experiences. However, the high levels of complexity within their operations can make it hard for banks to adopt the new technologies they need for their innovation efforts.

Here, the power of the cloud and global best practices are critical to banks’ efforts. The introduction of 51风流Signavio to enterprise resource planning transformation efforts equips banks with standardised software processes to reduce human error, optimise the allocation of existing tech resources, and ensure core processes are sustainable and resilient.

Banks leveraging 51风流S/4HANA Public Cloud also gain access to insights at a local and global level into aspects such as best-practice processes, regulatory compliance, change management and more. By drawing on the insights from global peers, banks can make improved strategic decisions over core business and technology processes to reduce complexity and accelerate business transformation efforts.

Smaller Africa-based subsidiaries of larger global banking organisations can also leverage public cloud for a lighter approach to adopting new technologies that still easily integrates with the parent company’s core systems.

The adoption of 51风流S/4HANA Public Cloud among smaller fintech companies such as neobanks, payment providers, insurance agents and brokerages also makes it easier for banks to integrate third-party innovations into their core banking offering.

Considering the speed at which fintechs can acquire new customers, especially in non-traditional markets where banks don’t have a strong presence, the ability to integrate these customers into the broader banking offering provides a compelling commercial opportunity for banks seeking revenue and customer growth.

The impact of business AI and the scalability and flexibility offered by the cloud will transform Africa鈥檚 banking sector and power the next wave of innovation and growth. By leveraging global best practices and investing in a business technology platform that enables the adoption of business AI and other innovative technologies, banks can transform their decision-making capabilities, unlock new growth opportunities, and build sustainable and resilient business models.

This article first appeared via Banking’s bright future powered by Business AI, Cloud (topco.co.za).

The post Banking’s Bright Future Powered by Business AI, Cloud appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

Is it any surprise that banking is considered a low-growth, perhaps even ex-growth, industry? In recent years, banks have been vastly overshadowed by the growth of the big technology companies which, through the likes of Apple Pay, are already eating into their lucrative fees. In the US, the large banks 鈥� including Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Citi 鈥� together have a total value of about $2.2-trillion. But four companies that hardly existed in 2000 鈥� Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple 鈥� have a total value of $5.6-trillion.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of perhaps the most blue-chip bank on the planet, JPMorgan, says: “Banks are playing an increasingly smaller role in the
financial system.”

To Funeka Montjane, head of Standard Bank鈥檚 consumer and high net worth business, this illustrates that banks cannot afford to stick to their current business model of taking deposits and lending money. The legacy banks are in real danger of losing clients to competitors on all sides 鈥� whether it is to the new challenger banks such as TymeBank or Bank Zero, focused lending businesses such as Lulalend, or the transactional arms of the big tech companies such as Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Today, “fintech companies” 鈥� which focus on the intersection of banking and technology, largely around payments 鈥� are far more highly prized by investors. It means there鈥檚 a danger that banks will be disintermediated from clients who will no longer look to them directly for loans.

Take WeBank, based in Shenzhen, China. It acts as a conduit for loans provided by partner banks. WeBank is part of the Naspers associate Tencent, which owns the customer relationship. In many cases, the clients don鈥檛 know, or care, which bank ultimately stands behind the loan.

For existing banks, it has been a big shock to the system.

Here in SA, the big four 鈥� Standard Bank, Absa, FNB and Nedbank 鈥� claimed for years there was no demand for anything other than what they were offering.

But the arrival of Capitec in 2001 felled this myth. It charges only a flat management fee of R5 to all clients, and has snapped up more than 16-million clients. And it鈥檚 done so at the expense of its bigger rivals.

The risk is that if the big banks don鈥檛 respond fast enough, they鈥檒l lose the best business to their nimbler competitors, leaving them with the riskier clients. There is still time for them to change course, however.

Kokkie Kooyman, who runs the Denker Global Financial Fund, says there is no evidence that the large US tech companies have any desire to set up banks in SA and subject themselves to local regulators. And, he says, the regulator, the Prudential Authority, will staunchly support local banks against threats to the status quo, such as the wholesale introduction of cryptocurrencies.

Still, they can鈥檛 afford to be complacent: banks need to offer a seamless digital service, and learn to leverage their huge data assets.

Chris Steward, banking analyst at Ninety One, says banks need to repurpose themselves for a world with much less paperwork. Many bank branches are still configured for the days when large amounts of manual tasks were carried out in the branch.

Platform banking: silver bullet or fad?

The silver bullet often touted is “platform banking” through super-apps 鈥� mobile applications that provide multiple services in a self-contained online platform.

Standard Bank, Nedbank and FNB are scrambling to become “platform organisations”, offering their own and other nonbanking services to customers through an online platform, while still running branch networks.

Nedbank CEO Mike Brown argues that clients expect their bank to support the full range of their lifestyle.

This is why Nedbank has launched its super-app, called Avo, which retail banking head Ciko Thomas would like to have “anything legal” on offer.

Its predecessor 100 years ago was the Sears Roebuck catalogue, which offered everything from high fashion to power tools for farmers in the
remotest corners of thinly populated US states such as North Dakota and Wyoming.

For Standard Bank, which has a wide footprint across Africa, such a platform would be larger than even the Sears Roebuck catalogue. It means the bank can help small farmers in Uganda get access to good-quality maize seeds, for example.

For the banks, the main benefit from super-apps comes from what is known as embedded finance. The platform will get a nominal commission if a large flat-screen TV is sold on its platform, for example. But the real gravy comes when, with just a couple of additional clicks, the product is added to the customer鈥檚 insurance policy or a loan is given to pay off the TV over three to six months.

FNB CEO Jacques Celliers believes that “super-app” is an overtraded term.

“For us it isn鈥檛 about the app, but more about what鈥檚 behind the app,” he says.

Celliers believes the focus should not be on attracting eyeballs, but on generating meaningful activity and data points. He says that unlike the new disrupters, FNB has a huge trust relationship with its clients, built over 183 years.

“It is no different from a bicycle manufacturer which has built up a reputation for reliability over more than a century, even if the product itself looks completely different, and uses entirely different materials.”

Celliers argues that FNB already has quite a few of the building blocks for platform banking through its eBucks loyalty programme. It is already the largest travel agent in the country, thanks to the range of flights and hotels available in its “catalogue”.

And it is hard for any app to compete with its banking app when it comes to the number of logins 鈥� FNB has more than 130-million a month.

“As there are more and more untrustworthy websites, providing fake news and disreputable offers, the banking app provides considerable trust and security,” says Celliers. “We certainly wouldn鈥檛 abuse the trust of our clients. For example, we would never set up a dating site. That would be a significant ethical breach.”

But part of the problem for banks is that, if anything, the telecoms companies are better placed to set up super-apps. Without the minimum capital pressures of banks, they are better able to tolerate the costs of running super-apps before they turn profitable.

In recent months, Vodacom launched VodaPay. After just one month鈥檚 trading, it has more than 500,000 customers. That makes it larger than Nedbank鈥檚 Avo, which has been in business for 18 months.

VodaPay also has access to 40-million clients 鈥� and more than 500-million in the wider Vodacom group, now that the Ethiopian and Egyptian businesses are coming on board.

Mariam Cassim, head of financial and digital services at Vodacom, says: “It is a pleasant experience in its own right, while other super-apps [such as Avo] are designed to meet a single need, such as calling a plumber.”

VodaPay partners with Bidvest on savings and deposits, and with Lulalend on loans. Niche brands such as women鈥檚 clothing boutique Michelle Ludek, which may not get prominent spots in physical malls, flaunt their brands on VodaPay.

Cassim says that because Vodacom has millions of clients at both ends of the income spectrum, it is better placed to span the entire market 鈥� from basic cash-based services to sophisticated virtual malls.

Nedbank鈥檚 Avo is certainly trying to be as comprehensive as VodaPay, and isn鈥檛 just open to Nedbank clients: 35% of its business is with clients of other banks.

Brown told a recent UBS conference he expects Avo to be a virtuous circle or “flywheel”, along the lines of Uber. If it can prove it has customer utility, it will continue growing in transactions and advertising revenue, and will attract more merchants.

Deep relationships, not superficial hook-ups

However, The Economist magazine recently ran a column debunking the myth of flywheel businesses.

The nine ride-hailing and delivery businesses listed on stock exchanges so far 鈥� including Uber and Lyft 鈥� have racked up operating losses of $11.5bn. And loyalty is also a myth: passengers often switch between the two largest platforms.

Absa is the only big SA bank that is sceptical about super-apps.

Christine Wu, Absa鈥檚 head of digital services, asks: if a bank鈥檚 super-app offers a platform to every plumber and electrician in the neighbourhood, who is the customer going to blame if they have a bad experience?

“We simply don鈥檛 have the experience or the resources to provide the safeguards which Amazon can provide on its products and services,” she says.

According to Wu, the super-apps set up by Tencent and Alipay in China look impressive, but they cost $15bn to launch. They could take years to provide a return on investment.

It鈥檚 more realistic, she says, to have a few closely monitored partnerships intimately tied to Absa products, such as Private Property, the national real estate website.

“We believe in deep relationships, not in thousands of superficial hook-ups,” she says.

Wu believes it鈥檚 best for banks to focus on their core financial services products. So Absa is going another way: it plans to embed more financial advice in its app and is redesigning its stockbroking website to enable more self-service of unit trusts, shares and exchange traded funds.

Bank Zero CEO Yatin Narsai also believes platform banking is simply a distraction. “The priority should be to make the core banking proposition competitive and to cut overheads to make this possible,” he says.

Denker鈥檚 Kooyman believes the best example of a super-app produced by a bank is from Russia鈥檚 Tinkoff Bank, now the world鈥檚 largest digital-only bank, with 12-million primary customers.
It was founded in 2006 and has no branches. Its main nonbanking services are hotel bookings and movies, as well as package holidays booked through Tinkoff Travel.

Yet investors treat Tinkoff more like a tech company, as its shares trade at an expensive p:e of 22 鈥� more in line with a firm such as Amazon than a bank.

The top-rated large SA bank, FirstRand, trades on a p:e of about 12.

Given the premium paid for fintech firms, it is perhaps not surprising that Celliers sometimes quips that FNB shouldn鈥檛 be called a bank any more, but a digital platform.

The reaction to Tinkoff by the main Russian incumbent bank, the state-controlled SberBank, echoes Standard Bank almost word for word.

Last year, SberBank said it wanted to transform into an ecosystem, offering movies, music, food delivery, cloud storage and taxi bookings. The only problem is that this is 14 years after Tinkoff entered the market.

Still, with a 36% share of the Russian banking market, Sber can afford to employ the best data scientists and internet marketing specialists. Its online portal has received good reviews and could start to make Tinkoff鈥檚 life difficult.

So it鈥檚 still too early to make a call on who will win this race.

No threat yet

As it stands, SA鈥檚 challenger banks have yet to prove a threat in the secured finance units, such as mortgages and vehicle finance. Even Capitec has made only tentative steps into these sectors, through partners such as SA Home Loans.

But TymeBank CEO Tauriq Keraan says the legacy banks would be complacent to think the challengers will remain skinny, with limited products.

“New banks have the opportunity of offering home loans and vehicle finance by partnering with other players,” he says.

Through its “buy now, pay later” option, and recent partnership with TFG, TymeBank now has a strong foothold in consumer finance.

Just last week Naspers/Prosus CEO Bob van Dijk said he expects the “buy now, pay later” option to lead to a significant increase in online purchases on its payment businesses worldwide.

Discovery Bank, part of Adrian Gore鈥檚 Discovery Group, is one of the newer banks with plenty of potential to snap up tech-savvy customers.
Its Vitality chassis, which began as an add-on to the Discovery medical aid with the goal of inducing behavioural shifts, is, in many ways, the precursor of the current super-apps. For years, it has been partnering with cinema chain Ster-Kinekor, gym group Virgin Active and airline kulula in offering discounts.

Its bank follows the same “behaviour economics model”, rewarding “good behaviour”, such as saving more and not abusing credit, with lower costs and better interest rates.

Still, Discovery Bank was criticised for paying more than R4bn for an old-school 51风流core banking system 鈥� considered an anachronism in today鈥檚 cloud-based software world.

Discovery Bank CEO Hylton Kallner argues that the bank鈥檚 technology stack is built on a modern and agile yet robust platform, able to support a full range of products, from credit cards to savings products and foreign exchange.

“Our core banking system therefore had to be fully scalable and robust and was developed on the latest 51风流platform at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems,” he says. “The system is delivering the most robust performance in the market currently.”

Kallner says the system handles more than 150,000 transactions a day with virtually 100% uptime, no failures and the highest levels of security.

The bank, he says, can also rapidly roll out significant product enhancements: this year, it was the first bank to introduce Apple Pay. It also released a financial analyser tool, and developed forex solutions.

Bank Zero chair Michael Jordaan believes it鈥檚 a not a binary choice between established and digital banks.

“We know the majority of Bank Zero customers have kept the accounts at their original banks. Many clients are still prepared to pay for the rich functionality of the legacy banks,” he says. “Some even get comfort from driving past a large head office 鈥� a sign of a 鈥榩roper鈥� bank 鈥� but we prefer not to waste money on marble floors.”

Jordaan argues that Bank Zero doesn鈥檛 need a call centre and has had much less need for a fraud department. “We hope that our app is so intuitive there is little need to ask questions 鈥� and so far queries have been negligible. And we have built significantly more powerful protections against fraud than the legacy banks.”

Nonetheless, Bank Zero has lost traction as, due to Covid and the perfectionism of its IT programmers, it launched more than a year after its digital competitors.

The end of cash?

Bank Zero has made a controversially big bet: that physical cash will eventually be phased out of the SA market. You can see the rationale, as cash is expensive, with most banks charging about R9.50 for every R1,000 drawn from ATMs.

Jordaan believes there will come a time when taxi fares, and even vegetables at the market, will be paid for by a debit card, or even a QR code from your smartphone.

But Kooyman says that in many emerging markets such as India, branch networks are growing, as many people still use cash, partly because of a low level of financial education.

In SA, the square metreage of branches will continue to fall as more customers become comfortable about depositing cash at ATMs, instead of at tellers inside the branch.

Branches in more sophisticated urban areas might follow the example of the Netherlands, which doesn鈥檛 allow deposits at tellers鈥� counters, given the cost of employing someone for a job that can just as easily be done by a machine.

However, Ninety One鈥檚 Steward says there will continue to be resistance to a wholesale move away from cash, as informal traders and taxi owners aren鈥檛 keen to be brought into the tax net.

Amid all these dynamics, are bank branches set to go the way of the dinosaur?

Kooyman says many banks consider their branch networks to be an asset in their home territories 鈥� JPMorgan continues to open branches (under the Chase brand) in the state of New York, for example.

And the legacy banks often come up with sentimental reasons for maintaining a branch network.

In FNB鈥檚 case, Celliers says it is a way to show commitment to the communities around the country. “I like to think of it as a Mugg & Bean in
every town. Even if clients prefer bankers to come to them, there is always somewhere to meet your banker and have a cup of coffee,” he says.

When banks have pulled their branches out of small towns and villages, they鈥檝e suffered political damage. In the UK, for example, thousands of accounts were closed in protest. In some cases, the big banks returned.

Kallner believes Discovery is in a privileged position, as it doesn鈥檛 have that baggage. He says studies show Covid has accelerated consumer preferences for digital channels, across all age groups.

He says more than 40% of contacts take place outside traditional business hours, which makes Discovery鈥檚 call centre vital. Its “live assist” function allows call centre agents to view the client鈥檚 mobile banking app, and guide them with a virtual pointer.

What It Means

For bank super-apps, the gravy comes when a purchased product is added to the insurance policy or a short-term loan is given to pay it off.

Still, Discovery Bank鈥檚 fees can be far higher than either Bank Zero鈥檚 or TymeBank鈥檚 鈥� and fiendishly complicated too.

But Kallner says even entry-level and unengaged clients get good value.

It鈥檚 clear there will always be demand for high-touch relationship banking 鈥� the model for Investec鈥檚 retail clients, for example.

So Discovery, with its affluent profile, has hired a team of “relationship bankers”, who offer private banking services to clients on the Discovery Bank Purple products, where the entry point is annual earnings of R2.5m. These customers get face-to-face or video conference consultations, as well as advice on everything from investments and insurance to estate planning.

Which suggests that while the bank of the future is indeed digital, there will always be a demand 鈥� and scope 鈥� for human interaction.

This article first appeared on Business Live.

The post Just What is SA鈥檚 Bank of the Future? appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

One recent study found that .

For one of South Africa’s largest and most innovative banks, a rapidly growing customer base hungry for its banking services led to an ambitious and award-winning digital transformation project built on SAP’s powerful S/4HANA platform.

“As a business we believe in the power of technology to make banking interactions easier and simpler for our customers. That includes the back-office functions that supports the banking interactions,” says Werner Carstens, 51风流Architect at Capitec. “However, our existing systems and processes could not keep pace with our rapid growth, creating several operational challenges. We chose to introduce new capabilities in our internal support services organisation and to deploy 51风流S/4HANA to support the execution. The establishment of these capabilities were aligned with the 51风流process design initiatives during the 19-month implementation process.”

Capitec is a leading banking services provider in South Africa that was founded in 2001. Today, Capitec provides a range of simple, affordable, and accessible banking and financial services to its 16 million clients.

Prior to the implementation, Capitec had to contend with increased people overhead due to a reliance on manual data capturing, which reduced its capacity for information analysis and business optimisation. A duplication of effort across applications and departments, with disparate master data and a lack of end-to-end process oversight added further challenges.

In the four years leading up to the project, Capitec experienced average client growth of 94 000 per month, but that grew to 160 000 clients per month during the implementation, growth that has been sustained post the project.

“Our back-office process management challenges had a negative impact on the ability of our support services to reach their service level agreements with customer-facing delivery teams. We identified our general ledger, procurement, project systems, asset management and real estate processes as key priority areas for the project.”

Carstens adds that the rapid growth across the business during the project impacted the support service organisation鈥檚 target operating model, process design, functional specification, and change management initiatives, as well as the availability of key team members. 鈥淗owever, following the implementation we have gained a truly best-of-breed ERP solution that integrates with our existing budget and planning solution, and is scalable enough to support us into 2025 and beyond.”

The implementation was recently recognised at the 51风流Quality Awards, where it won in the Business Transformation category. Carstens says the buy-in and support from executives and the establishment of a dedicated project team across business and IT contributed to the overall success of the project.

“Our team established KPIs and interventions to monitor the progress of transactional processing against expected volumes for the month post go-live and tracked actuals on a weekly basis to identify deviances. This enabled us to identify process bottlenecks and implement appropriate interventions. Following the implementation, we continued to enhance and adapt the implementation to support our aim of building high-performance support services capabilities.鈥�

Cameron Beveridge, Regional Director for Southern Africa at SAP, says Capitec has leapt ahead in its ability to serve its growing customer base with this highly successful digital transformation project. 鈥淭he way customers interact with their bank has changed irrevocably over the past eighteen months, requiring banks to transform their back-office operations to improve customer-facing processes. With this ambitious and highly successful technology implementation, Capitec has transformed its ability to meet modern customer demands while also gaining greater efficiency, accuracy and intelligence across its operations.鈥�

The post Capitec Transforms Operational Capabilities with 51风流S/4HANA to Keep Pace with Rapid Growth appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

The programme will go live in South Africa next.

The programme, named Owari (signifying interconnectivity), is an initiative to ultimately standardise and transform Absa鈥檚 financial reporting and procurement processes across the 14 countries in which the group operates.

鈥淔inancial reporting and vendor processes are typically complex and onerous processes for multinational companies with legacy systems,鈥� says John Annandale, Absa鈥檚 group financial controller.

鈥淲e are migrating all Absa entities onto a back-office finance and procurement template solution on fully integrated platforms, enabling us, longer term, to standardise and automate these processes,鈥� he says.

Absa Group鈥檚 primary ledger as well as group reporting and consolidation will ultimately move to the new solution, improving controls and reducing risk by consolidating all financial data across finance, risk, and treasury functions.

The Owari programme delivered an integrated general ledger solution by integrating a 51风流S/4 HANA enterprise resource planning system on AWS with Coupa, a Software as a Service (SaaS) spend management solution, in Kenya. The end-to-end solution is fully cloud-based, rather than residing in on-premises data centres. This means that the solution can be accessed online at any time from any location.

Absa is increasingly adopting cloud-based computing in lieu of on-premises data centres, based on scalability, cost and efficiency benefits.

鈥淓stablishing the new integrated solution, and as a fully cloud-based service, was a great challenge,鈥� says Ebrahim Samodien, CIO in the Absa Group technology office. 鈥淢any companies have struggled to transfer finance processes to the cloud as it is challenging from a data, technical and regulatory point of view. Owari was successful in Kenya as a result of the approach we took and the software and technology choices we made.鈥�

This article first appeared on .

The post Absa to Implement Finance and Procurement Programme appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

While everyone understands the why and the opportunities of digital transformation, the hardest part seems to be how to holistically transform. Indeed, many companies think that digital transformation will happen just by performing a technical migration to the cloud or by buying new technology. The need for changing how an enterprise runs with the help of new business models and more intelligent processes is often ignored.

So we asked ourselves: what can we do to support our customers on this journey even better? How can we help them change the culture and mindset of their enterprises, redesign their business processes, and reduce internal complexity, ultimately enabling them to adopt new business models and stay ahead of their competition?

Let鈥檚 be honest: Infrastructure as a Service or Software as a Service alone won鈥檛 cut it. To truly transform, companies need a holistic offering. What they really need is Business Transformation as a Service.

Our answer to this is RISE with SAP. Together with our ecosystem, we are bundling everything companies need to holistically transform their business with a fast time to value — at their own speed and terms, regardless of their starting point. It simplifies our customers鈥� journey in three simple steps.

Step 1: Business Process Redesign

Making use of best practices and building on SAP鈥檚 unique data treasures, our Business Process Intelligence solution allows customers to continuously analyze how processes perform, benchmark them against industry standards, and provide tailored recommendations on how to adopt new business models, automate, and standardize processes. Thanks to a direct connection to SAP鈥檚 workflow, robotic process automation (RPA), and other artificial intelligence (AI) services, intelligence can be seamlessly embedded in business processes.

Step 2: Technical Migration

Embedded in RISE with 51风流are technical services to smooth the migration to a standard, modular, and flexible solution landscape with a consistent data layer 鈥� key to reacting quickly to new business demands. This includes essential services by 51风流and partners to get rid of modifications and custom code and to support them in harmonizing and governing their data layer so they can run and steer their company based on one source of truth.

Step 3: Build Your Intelligent Enterprise

The basis is the cloud infrastructure. Customers will gain a reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to their existing landscapes, by running the workloads in an 51风流data center or via the hyperscalers, always with the best operations costs in the industry. And no matter which infrastructure they chose or who the operations partner is, 51风流will be their single point of contact.

Also part of RISE with 51风流is 51风流Business Technology Platform, the foundation of the Intelligent Enterprise. Customers and partners can quickly develop innovations to easily complement 51风流solutions 鈥� thanks to one semantical data model, one AI and analytics layer, one identity and authorization concept, and the same application business services, such as one workflow management. Additional low-code/no-code capabilities make it even easier to expand our solutions. And our platform enables out-of-the-box integration: 51风流to SAP, but also 51风流to non-SAP.

Access to 51风流Business Network is also included. Times when companies are managing their business within four walls with one-to-one connections to the stakeholders across the supply chain are over. From now on, it is all about managing the complete supply chain in real time — to react faster than anyone else to changing market conditions.

And finally, as you need intelligent applications to truly change how your business runs, we will include our market-leading intelligent ERP, 51风流S/4HANA Cloud. Customers not only can pick their deployment of choice depending on their level of standardization, but also benefit from embedded AI, RPA, and advanced analytics. And as we all have realized how important it is to run a frictionless enterprise, we will integrate Microsoft Teams across our solution portfolio to bring collaboration to the next level.

In short: RISE with 51风流provides our customers with the basic components of an intelligent enterprise in one bundle, complemented with premium services and tools. One offer. One contract for SAP-related services. One responsible party for service-level agreements, operations, and issue handling. It鈥檚 as simple as that.

Building on this kickstart, companies can tailor their intelligent enterprise to meet their respective business needs. Customers and partners alike can easily complement, extend, and integrate with any other of our line-of-business and industry solutions, partner, or third-party solution, using exactly the same data model and business services as our own 51风流apps. This allows them to run their core and industry-specific processes 鈥� seamlessly, end-to-end, and top-to-bottom, with full 360掳 transparency.

For more information, check out the following blogs by my colleagues Juergen Mueller, Thomas Saueressig, and聽Uwe Grigoleit,聽as well as an interview with聽Jan Gilg, and see what our partners have to say.

Christian Klein is CEO of SAP.

This article first appeared on the 51风流Global News Center

The post Introducing RISE with 51风流鈥� Business Transformation as a Service appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

Physical distancing has been mandated by governments across the globe, consumers are hunkering down in the safety of their homes, rarely venturing out and digital engagement, along with touchless technologies, have exponentially increased. However, it can be argued that in fact, quite the opposite is true; that the Experience Economy, now, is more important than ever before.

And here鈥檚 why. As companies try to connect with their consumers, employees and partners; as they try and meet the unmet and unarticulated needs of their stakeholders, the experiences they deliver, at this critical inflection point of our history, will be more important than ever to their long term success.

As a concept, the Experience Economy is not new. A 1998 article in Harvard Business Review titled 鈥榃elcome to the Experience Economy鈥� highlighted how leading companies understood that 鈥渢he next competitive battleground lies in staging experiences.鈥� Products and services were no longer seen as differentiators.

By 2017, McKinsey had declared 鈥楨xperiences are king鈥� as their research confirmed how consumers had gradually shifted their expenditure from products to experiences. In their report, McKinsey found that personal consumption expenditure on experience-related services had grown 1.5 times faster than total personal consumption spending and nearly four times faster than expenditure on products.

Gartner even declared that 2019 would be the year that experience overtake product and price as the main competitive differentiators for brands and businesses. Positive, hyper-personalised experiences were now required to sweeten the deal for consumers.

Rise of Intelligent Experiences

In line with the rise of exponential technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and the Internet of Thing, the concept of the Experience Economy has also evolved over the past few years. Today, successful businesses manage their experiences as a core strategic business capability. They have seen how customers are willing to pay more for experiences. They understand that the value needle has shifted.

This new approach is powered by Intelligence. Intelligent Experience Management leverages the power of exponential technologies 鈥� AI, IoT, advanced analytics 鈥� to drive a more optimal customer, employee, product and brand experiences. This relentless focus on value delivery through enhanced experiences, is what will allow enterprises to win in today鈥檚 market.

And these exponential technologies powering differentiated business capabilities, are vital to the long term success of enterprises, because of the volume and nature of data that informs modern Experience Economy strategies. Traditionally, organisations relied heavily on operational data 鈥� revenue, inventory, suppliers, workforce 鈥� to make decisions, but today they need insights from a different type of data to augment the value their provide to their customers; they need experience data.

Experience data provides insights into the sentiment and emotional aspects that influence a customer, employee, partner or supplier decisions towards a brand. In short, operational data reveals what is happening in an organisation, and experience data reveals why and how it is happening.

An Intelligent Experience Management strategy would measure and track operational data and experience data and use AI in combination with other exponential technologies to construct and augment individualised profiles of customers, employees, brands or products. Predicitve or Prescriptive actions can then be taken in order to optimally drive outcomes that matter.

Put another way, instead of reacting to problems when they occur, increasing the 鈥榚xperience gap鈥�, companies can now get ahead of the curve and address challenges before they have a lasting negative impact on the organisation.

The impact and advantage of this type of capability will be indispensable to organisations as they adapt to changing customer behaviour in the wake of the pandemic. While adoption of digital services has exponentially increased across the globe, the events of 2020 and the resulting shift in consumer behaviour, will put additional pressure on organisations to transform how they engage with customer and employees.

And nowhere is this shift as apparent as in the financial services sector.

Experience Economy transforming banks, insurers

Banks鈥� relationships with their customers have largely been built on the basis of compliance: often a box-ticking exercise that ensures the bank鈥檚 conduct is in line with a robust set of rules and standards and that the consumer adheres to a strict set of principles.

This dynamic prevailed until the emergence of the internet and other digital technologies that created new channels for customer engagement. According to a recent Qualtrics study, of all the time customers spent interacting with their bank, 47% of that time was via online channels, and less than a third of that time in person. The same study found that 鈥楶oor Service鈥� was the second-most important factor in consumers considering leaving their bank for a competitor.

The banking industry is extremely competitive. Most banks generally offer the same types of products and services. The real differentiation lies in the experience that customers have when interacting with the bank. And the cost of a poor experience I this industry has become increasingly significant: a 2018 survey by Forrester Research found that, for every one-point decline in its customer experience score, a multi-channel bank loses $124-million in potential revenue.

Banks, competing with more agile fin-techs and a growing ecosystem of non-traditional financial services providers 鈥� including the powerful telco industry 鈥� have taken note of this and have been making significant investment into their Experience Economy strategies. By 2018, McKinsey found that three out of four of the world鈥檚 50 largest banks were committed to some form of customer experience transformation.

Insurers are also taking note.

Insurance provider Allianz recently leveraged Qualtrics, the experience management platform, to collect experience data from customers in 22 countries. Using the platform to filter and priorities insights by location, and function, Allianz could empower their customer-facing teams with the certainty to know what action to take to deliver a seamless and positive experience at every step of each customers鈥� engagement with the company.

Allianz has also used the experience data to develop entirely new products to help protect businesses from emerging risks, improve its reputation for quality consultations and become integral business partners to its customers, building lasting loyalty.

Financial services companies that have not invested in transforming their customer and employee experiences will be left far behind their competitors in a post-2020 world. Leaving experience management to chance is a recipe for failure.

Instead, organisations should seek ways to improve their collection and processing of experience data and combine that with operational data to make informed decisions over the future of their companies.

The post Manage Experiences Intelligently in a Socially Distant World appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

In 2018, we awarded Nedbank with the SailPoint Customer Impact Award, which honours customers for their focused identity strategy that has made a direct impact to the organisation and delivered measurable results. We are quite proud of the tireless work Nedbank has put in to get where they are today, and we congratulate them on their success. This blog explores the identity journey they are on and the path they have taken to generate impactful results leveraging an identity platform.

Legacy environments burden IT staff and users

Financial institutions often have legacy and mainframe solutions for their backend systems. Over the years, technology piles on top of these legacy systems, becoming increasingly difficult to maintain and manage. As additional functionality is added, maintenance costs increase and the complexities of the environment create inefficiencies. To build a secure and efficient identity program at Nedbank, foundational changes needed to be made.

Nedbank was experiencing several issues managing identity within the organisation. Identity roles and permissions were being added based on individual project needs. This caused the number of roles to proliferate at an increasing rate 鈥� often referred to as 鈥渞ole explosion鈥�. The lack of a clear view of access across teams and specific job roles because of their disparate systems, and the dependency on outdated legacy tools, became a top concern for the bank. In addition, the level of technical complexity required to grant and certify access prevented business owners from taking on accountability for the access that their teams had. Nedbank needed a clearer understanding of access defined for each role and what was actually being assigned.

On top of this, the demand on two IT staff members who understood the layers of systems and how they interacted was also becoming unmanageable. The years of knowledge these two people had acquired being involved in many projects and the various application security layers was difficult to transfer to new staff.

鈥淎 few years ago, a team was adding functionality to a client servicing platform, which added access to 35 roles. They inadvertently attempted to assign credit override capabilities to the call centre agents. This was a wake-up call for us,鈥� said Louise van Schalkwyk, Head: Centre for Access Governance at Nedbank.

This complex IT environment, as well as the immense regulatory pressure to secure valuable client information in the financial services industry, drove Van Schalkwyk to elevate the situation to the Nedbank executive team. They agreed that disparate systems left them without a protection layer and standardising on a consistent and modern identity governance platform was a necessary investment in the company鈥檚 security program.

Investing in the future

SailPoint became the foundation of their identity governance program that would soon alleviate the pains of issuing access, provide a clear path and history of access approvals, as well as give the company a solution to construct and evolve their digital footprint. From this program, the Centre for Access Governance (CAG) at Nedbank was also born, a department Van Schalkwyk leads. The CAG is the bridge between the business and technical configuration for the identity program.

Van Schalkwyk set out to integrate 51风流with their HR system, to help drive all downstream activities and implement provisioning and decommissioning capabilities, to serve as the foundation of the identity governance strategy that would grow with them. Prior to SailPoint, Nedbank was running manual certification campaigns on their legacy environment, which has now been replaced with automated quarterly access reviews in SailPoint. Since implementation, they have achieved a 92% completion rate for entitlements pushed out for review to be approved or revoked. 鈥淭he access reviewers have shared how quick and easy certifications are with SailPoint,鈥� Van Schalkwyk shared. About 200 users per month are experiencing a change in access 鈥� usually access to certain applications and data being decommissioned.

鈥淏y provisioning access through SailPoint, we鈥檝e seen the set-up time for the initial employee access to systems and data dramatically improve. It used to take six weeks to get staff members up and running and now we see that in a day. This provides huge business value.鈥� As the number of applications onboarded onto SailPoint increases, capacity is created for the reallocation of headcount and capacity to other security functions. Nedbank now has a clearer vision for the access their workforce has and continues to increase the precision of what is necessary for each job function, ensuring a least-privileged system.

Another result from the program is an improvement in user experience. 鈥淪ailPoint鈥檚 user interface is simple, clean and easy to use. We knew it would instantly improve the employees’ and managers’ experience, especially where direct provisioning happens,鈥� Van Schalkwyk shared.

From a security perspective, the Nedbank termination process has significantly improved towards full automation. Since the implementation of SailPoint, manual scripts are constantly replacing the need to build a report and then manually removing the access of terminated employees.

The CAG continues to evolve and improve the end-to-end processes under Van Schalkwyk鈥檚 leadership. 鈥淢y team has spent quite a bit of time on change management and developing training materials to help the staff and managers understand the importance of the identity program and aid them though adopting the tool. In the bigger organisation, the CAG helps to keep the focus on risk and risk mitigation, especially where it relates to unauthorised access.鈥�

Protecting data within the enterprise

Data management and security has recently become a large focus at Nedbank. 鈥淲e need to protect unstructured data lying around on file shares and other sites across the organisation. We extended our identity governance program to help data owners to manage secure access to their data. I see tremendous value in governing access to data as part of our single, integrated identity platform.鈥� SailPoint allows Nedbank to actively manage access to shares and files and not let that access go stale.

This article first appeared on .

The post Nedbank: From Legacy Identity Tools to Cutting-edge Identity Governance appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

Each experience is inextricably linked to the next and, when managed multilaterally, collectively has the power to radically reconfigure the organisation around experiences.

Delivering a great customer experience means also seeking out and eradicating poor experiences across the customer journey 鈥� with every touchpoint the customer comes across. That means the customer experience cannot be managed separately from other experiences that are so vital to the organisation鈥檚 success. This white paper explores experience management in retail banking.

Get the link to your free download on the ITWeb site:

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Despite the shock to the banking system, South Africa鈥檚 banking sector performed well and are currently sufficiently capitalised to withstand short term shocks. According to a report by PwC released in June, measures implemented in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis have helped banks absorb some of the initial shocks from Covid-19.

The Reserve Bank also cut rates by 300 basis points this year to bring the prime lending rate to historic lows. It has relaxed some banking rules to support local efforts providing relief to businesses and consumers, including easing liquidity requirements for restructured loans and rules for when such loans attract additional capital charges.

And in a rare relaxing of regulations, the trade and industry minister also exempted banks from some provisions in the Competition Act to allow them to come together to find joint solutions to the current crisis.

Race for customers is on

However, the speed at which things are changing and the pressure on consumers and businesses mean banks are in a race against time to refine their delivery, streamline their service, all while developing new products and services so that they can easily retain their existing customers and attract new ones.

Finding good new customers in a post-Covid-19 world will be tough. Banks need to minimise reasons for customers to defect to other providers.

Digitisation is the top priority. Banks need to deliver products, services and experiences tailored to customer needs enabled by a 360-degree view of each customer. Banks that struggle to digitise processes and give customers value in more convenient, personal and cost-effective ways will risk losing their customers to competitors that do.

The problem statement for all banks is similar: deliver integrated, data driven products and services uniquely to customers seamlessly through digital processes. South Africa鈥檚 banks have largely the same proporrtion of spend on technology, but some consistently deliver better, more integrated seamless offerings to the market, and maintain momentum doing it.

The challenge is to close the gap between investment into new technologies and the impact they have on the customer experience. In general, money spent doesn鈥檛 move the business far enough into the future for the money spent.

Consumer behaviour has also not been static during this year鈥檚 events; in fact, it is shifting in dramatic and consequential ways as customers exercise their choices from the comfort of their homes on digital devices. Banks need the analytical power to track and measure consumer behaviour in real time and at an individual level, and the agility to maintain and introduce new products and services at speed and scale.

To achieve this, banks need to develop streamlined and automated banking operations that seamlessly integrate finance, risk, and compliance across their retail and banking operations, coupled with individualisation and compelling offers, delivered in real time This is all enabled by a business technology platform that integrates operational and experience data for a holistic view of the organisation.

While banks continue to face pressure from upstart fintech innovators and non-traditional competitors such as telco companies, they remain in a uniquely powerful position. With access to customers鈥� most private financial information, banks could analyse and leverage both the operational data as well as new forms of experience data to better serve customers and win in the experience economy.

To enable this, banks should prioritise investment in four strategic areas, namely:

One: Seamless connectivity

Consumers are so used to the convenience of digital services that they now expect immediate fulfilment of their needs from their service providers. Banks are not designed for this: product systems, channel partners, risk and compliance – all these departments operate separately in a traditional bank setting, with little in terms of a total view of each customer, and limited integrated delivery

Banks need to transform their end-to-end processes across departments and lines of business to analyse each customers鈥� behaviour at an individual level. Using these insights, banks should design and offer personalised products that directly address a customers鈥� needs.

Two: Data-driven intelligence

This level of personalisation requires that banks collect and process operational data as well as experience data. Banks should build intelligent enterprise capabilities that can seamlessly integrate all data and apply machine learning and AI to create and simulate various business scenarios to understand how new products and services could impact their customers and operations.

This can deliver value across four key areas, namely faster time to market; lower research and development costs; an increase in revenue from new products; and a better understanding of their customers鈥� experiences and needs.

Three: Operational effectiveness

Banks need to break down data silos and become more connected to their customers through personalised services and consistently-positive experiences. Using customer and employee insights, banks could anticipate opportunities for new products or services that can create loyalty, boost retention and increase revenue.

Core to this is the automation of low-value manual processes to free up valuable internal skills for higher-value, revenue boosting tasks. Ultimately, banks can leverage their data further by opening it up to trusted external partners in an open banking ecosystem that radically improves opportunities for customer-centric innovation.

Four: Financial insight

Banks are subject to immense regulatory oversight. Remaining compliant to regulatory requirements can be costly and resource-intensive. Current processes are often overly manual and reactive, with entire teams dedicated purely to compliance. However, marrying operational and experience data in a business technology platform that delivers real-time insights can be a game-changer.

Banks can use operational and experience data to simulate financial market conditions in real time, allowing decision-makers to forecast various business scenarios and their financial impact. With more seamless risk and compliance management, banks could be better placed to enable third parties such as fintechs to share data and control via APIs, thereby accelerating the development of customer-centric and compliant product innovations.

The post Four Ways Banks can win the Customer Affinity Battle appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

To prepare for these shifts and to thrive in the future, financial companies need essential competencies. Key capabilities for today鈥檚 financial organizations include the following:

• Agility, which helps organizations keep pace with business and technology trends such as open banking, collaboration, and cloud deployment
• Acceleration, which allows financial companies to serve customers faster, for example, by using intelligent technologies, simplifying processes, reducing time to market for products, or enabling smart delivery options
• Cost efficiency to help financial institutions automate servicing up to full straight-through-processing
• Excellent business insight spanning from product information to revenue-related figures, such as interest key indicators

To help companies pave the way to intelligent transactional banking, 51风流collaborated with leading banks, researched market trends, and explored research insights. And the company built on its experience of providing the backbone of transactional banking for customers worldwide, managing millions of accounts and contracts.

By launching 51风流Transactional Banking for 51风流S/4HANA, 51风流is helping financial institutions provide next-generation banking services and extraordinary customer experiences. 聽The package provides financial institutions with an open-core banking platform that enables intelligent transactional banking. It allows banks to participate in ecosystems — supporting open banking and beyond. 聽Furthermore, it facilitates cost savings through intelligent technologies and processes.

51风流Transactional Banking for 51风流S/4HANA comprehensively supports and automates the servicing of transactional banking processes in both retail and corporate banking. The solution enables financial institutions to meet market demands such as cooperation, new business models, or cloud.

Solution highlights that help financial institutions cope with changing conditions in today鈥檚 banking industry include:

• Collaboration and ecosystems: APIs and other interfaces support open banking and new business opportunities including marketplaces.
• Cloud: A choice of flexible delivery options 鈥� such as cloud, hybrid, or on premise 鈥� and increased agility through faster deployment models are available.
• Innovative pricing models: Flexible capabilities provide options such as cross-product pricing.
• Fast time-to-market: Graphical product configuration helps users get up and running quickly.
• User experience: An award-winning user interface allows users to quickly become proficient.
• Next-generation processes: Simplified processing streamlines tasks, helping, for instance, to more efficiently manage open items.
• Real-time processing: 24×7 availability helps ensure rapid transaction processing.
• Intelligent automation: Automating numerous processes helps reduce costs using intelligent technologies; for example, using machine learning to help post-processing run faster and more efficiently.
• System landscape simplification: Deployment in a single instance with other 51风流S/4HANA solutions enhances cost efficiency
• Unseen data insights: The ability to integrate data from operational sources (OLTP) and analytical sources (OLAP) provides new ways of business insights.
• Reporting capabilities: On-the-fly calculations accelerate analysis with fast data access.

51风流Transactional Banking for 51风流S/4HANA offers valuable benefits to financial organizations, helping them achieve unparalleled competitive advantage on their intelligent enterprise journey.

For more information about the solution, visit the .

This article first appeared on the 51风流News Center.

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