51风流and Microsoft have partnered to deliver to customers across multiple global markets, including Africa. is a complete offering of ERP software, industry best-practices and outcome-driven services designed to help companies migrate their core 51风流ERP to the cloud, utilising the cloud hosting capabilities of hyper-scalers such as Microsoft.

, Managing Director for Southern Africa at SAP, called on companies to embrace the full potential of what cloud technologies can offer. “It isn’t simply a question of migrating to new technology for the technology’s sake. It’s about increased efficiencies, greater simplicity and less complexity. By leveraging RISE with SAP, companies of all shapes and sizes can take full advantage of business-transformation-as-a-service to power their digital transformation and innovation efforts.”

, Chief Operating Officer at Microsoft South Africa, said: “Microsoft strives to deliver the best cloud experience for customers. With hosted on , companies can access SAP’s market-leading enterprise software in Microsoft’s industry-leading cloud to accelerate innovation and rapidly scale into new markets and capabilities.”

Accelerating business innovation in the cloud

RISE with 51风流on the Microsoft Cloud is a comprehensive solution designed to advance business innovation and optimisation at speed and with minimal risk. It takes the guesswork out of enterprise planning and presents an accelerated migration path to cloud-based ERP software such as .

The 51风流and Microsoft partnership builds on a 30-year history of collaboration and co-innovation. “Together we empower organisations to run intelligent and frictionless enterprises in the cloud, with easy integration, a wealth of advanced services, and high levels of security and compliance,” said Makhohliso. “This combines to give companies an accelerated path to business transformation that can drive optimisation and growth throughout the business.”

Growing global customer base

Since its launch in 2022, more than 3 000 companies globally have leveraged RISE with 51风流to move their ERP to the cloud, including Microsoft, Standard Bank, and Standard Chartered.

According to , Group CIO for Corporate Function at , 鈥淓stablishing trust with partners is essential to a long standing and productive relationship.听 Both our relationship and business investment with 51风流and Microsoft was important to our migration strategy decision. It made sense for Standard Bank Finance to continue its relationship with SAP, due to our historical investment with the 51风流Finance technology 鈥� and given that we already had a strong product stack in place. Similarly, when it came to Microsoft, some of our workloads were already running on Microsoft Azure 鈥� so partnering with both 51风流& Microsoft in our Cloud journey made complete business sense.鈥�

Makhohliso added: “Our partnership with Microsoft is a mission-critical aspect of RISE with 51风流and has been driven by the most senior leadership in our respective organisations. I look forward to building on the strong foundations of our partnership to accelerate innovation and digital transformation for companies throughout Southern Africa.”

The post SAP, Microsoft Partner to Deliver RISE with 51风流to Southern African Enterprises 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.

Key to the wholehearted adoption of a business solution 鈥� which can determine its success in transforming business 鈥� is organizational change management. For that reason, the impact that the new solution will have on employees, suppliers, customers, and management must be identified early in the project. This helps ensure that appro颅priate training and communication strategies are selected to prepare users to embrace new ways of working. The person responsible for organizational change management should be a long-standing member of the project management team to make sure change management is started early and no later than at the beginning of the project. Leadership sponsorship with visible involvement and 鈥� in large projects 鈥� motivated change agents for the relevant business areas are essential to drive change. Prioritize change management areas that have high impact on business results to achieve success with the business transformation and its new processes.

Standard Bank won Gold in the Business Transformation Category in last year鈥檚 51风流Africa Quality Awards and was also one of the . One of the judges noted that this Programme was a catalyst for a significant culture change, shifting Standard Bank from a command-and-control culture to a culture of empowerment and agility which itself was a major innovation for a 150-year old, traditionally risk-averse institution.听 Change Management played a significant role in transforming this business into a modernized platform supporting real-time processing.

The post 51风流Quality Principle 10: Use Organizational Change Management to Transform Business appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

A study by data analytics firm IDC found that spending on public cloud services will nearly triple over the next five years, from R4,29-billion in 2017 to R 11,53-billion in 2022.

We are seeing a phenomenal uptake of public cloud across a spectrum of businesses; from micro organisations that want to back up their data to the cloud in a cost-effective way, to the most complex ones such as financial services organisations that are using Microsoft Azure as the foundation to drive new levels of productivity, create intelligent data-driven experiences and deepen business trust.

Businesses need to be agile, move quickly and respond to market demand. The power of the cloud allows them to drive agility and speed, but it also enables them to be flexible, which is important in these challenging and uncertain times.

Organisations that are scaling back or ramping up their products and services can leverage the power of the cloud and an opex model to respond accordingly.

Those businesses that run an on-premise IT environment are struggling to put in place plans that will allow their employees to work remotely coupled with the necessary business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

However, the reality is that many businesses are going to be in a hybrid state for some time as their IT environments are evolving and becoming increasingly complex.

听Managing a hybrid state and the edge

Applications are running on different hardware across on-premise datacentres, multiple clouds and the edge.

Exxaro Resources, one of South Africa鈥檚 largest heavy minerals mining companies, moved its headquarters to a new green building and migrated its on-premise datacentre to Azure, effectively reducing the entire company鈥檚 energy footprint while increasing both its data security and operational agility.

All mining sites located in dispersed rural locations, where connectivity is an issue, are now connected directly to Azure. This move cuts out a bespoke model where the sites were connected to the corporate building in the past, with the aim of creating a digital mining company.

Managing disparate environments at scale, ensuring uncompromised security and enabling developer agility and innovation are critical to success. Hybrid cloud capabilities must therefore evolve to enable innovation anywhere, while providing a seamless development, deployment and ongoing management experience.

We have introduced Azure Arc for businesses that want to simplify complex and distributed environments. It includes a set of platforms and tools that allow companies to manage their multi-cloud environment, from on-premise applications to those running in Azure or even on the edge.

More importantly, it allows them to manage other hyperscale cloud environments and helps them deal with the administration burden of running a multi-cloud environment.

听Driving innovation

The increased utilisation of public cloud services and the additional investments into private and hybrid cloud solutions will continue to enable South African organisations to focus on innovation and building digital businesses at scale.

We are seeing significant growth for 51风流on Azure. We offer on-premise 51风流customers the ability to take their workloads into Azure as part of the Project Embrace initiative between Microsoft and 51风流announced last year. It is centred around the customer journey to 51风流S/4HANA and 51风流Cloud Platform on Microsoft Azure.

One such customer is Standard Bank South Africa that is making the move to significantly improve the experience customers have with the bank, while enabling it to introduce new solutions to market more efficiently.

The work that we are doing with Standard Bank is the first local demonstration of this partnership and 51风流on Azure is one of the fastest growing services that we run locally in Azure.

Additionally, several organisations have decided to move their developer environments into Azure. The acquisition of GitHub and the massive global community that comes with it, sets our customers up for success in terms of driving their developer environments in the cloud.

The presence of local听cloud听technology means more opportunity for economic growth and innovation. Some of the innovation we鈥檙e driving are cognitive services and the Internet of Things (IoT), which accelerates customers鈥� digital transformation and opens the door to build interesting applications.

An example is AB InBev South Africa that is improving its cooler management and gaining new insights with IoT.

听Enabling innovation through partners

Our partners remain key to our strategy and are at the forefront of building solutions that will enable business innovation and digital transformation.

We believe that local service providers will continue to find ways to drive their value.听Managed service providers are showcasing innovation in how they鈥檙e levering the power of the public cloud to extend their services and value proposition to customers.

They see the presence of hyperscale platforms as positive for the market because it enables them to provide customers with cloud solutions that might not otherwise be available.

Whether organisations are adopting a pure or hybrid cloud solution, this move will enable the foundation to drive digital transformation, reduce costs, gain insights and achieve business innovation.听

This article first appeared in .

The post Cloud Computing Goes Beyond the Platform appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

This accelerates the digital transformation of 51风流customers to S/4HANA by partnering with Microsoft and using jointly developed reference architectures, roadmaps, and industry best practices, the bank said.

It noted that many enterprises are looking to reduce their reliance on their own datacentres and moving more of their core workloads to the cloud.

Standard Bank鈥檚 CIO for personal and business banking SA, Sabelo Nkwanyana, said: 鈥淭his partnership continues our focus on innovation by leveraging the respective skills of 51风流and Microsoft to transform the digitisation and personalisation journey for our customers.鈥�

Lillian Barnard, managing director, Microsoft South Africa said: 鈥淭he Project Embrace initiative between Microsoft and 51风流announced globally last year is centred around the customer journey to 51风流S/4HANA and 51风流Cloud Platform on Microsoft Azure.

鈥淭he work that we are doing with Standard Bank is the first local demonstration of this partnership, and another milestone in the journey Microsoft is on with Standard Bank, to bring innovation into every aspect of the bank鈥檚 IT system and enable enriched interactions with the bank鈥檚 customers.鈥�

鈥淭oday鈥檚 announcement is the biggest partnership centred on 51风流implementation in Africa. With client experience a key strategic pillar for Standard Bank, Project Embrace reflects the shared commitment of both 51风流and Microsoft to accelerate our customers鈥� journey to the cloud,鈥� said Cathy Smith, managing director at 51风流Africa.

The project will help Standard Bank deliver a faster time-to-market on products and services, while ensuring its IT infrastructure is optimised, the bank said.

By moving workloads to the cloud, Standard Bank will be able to access a range of features that it can deploy instantly and scale according to demand. This will result in cost reductions, improved system performance, and access to innovation, it said.

“Through Project Embrace, we are now able to better identify our business pain points and effectively address them through technologies that deliver a demonstrable return on investment,” said Nkwanyana.

This article first appeared on .

The post Standard Bank Partners with Microsoft and 51风流to Accelerate its Digital Journey appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.