Banking giant Barclays Africa Group plans to roll-out digital strategies adopted by its South African business Absa across the rest of the continent, as part of its ‘digital eagles’ initiative.

This is according to Adrian Vermooten, head of digital channels and payments at Absa, speaking at a press briefing on Thursday in Johannesburg.

Absa, wholly owned by Barclays Africa Group, is currently updating its existing technologies while developing further innovations in a bid to transform the way its customers bank. The Barclays Africa Group, in turn, is 62.3% owned by the United Kingdom’s Barclays Bank.

Vermooten told ITWeb Africa that Barclays Africa Group -- which operates in countries such as Botswana, Ghana and Mozambique -- already has a digital presence in most of its African businesses through three channels: internet banking, an unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) service called ‘Hello Money’ and the application space for customers to interact.

"What we are focusing on this year is building the depth of functionality across those three channels," he told ITWeb Africa.

"We've taken our ‘digital eagles programme’ that was first rolled out in South Africa and rolled it out into Africa to help our staff in those regions become digitally savvy.

"We're also looking at putting Wi-Fi in some of our Africa branches as well as internet kiosks in the branches. We know that people don't have access to connectivity, PCs... and the reason we do it in the branches is that its a secure environment," he explained.

The extent of the strategy roll-out could be widespread.

Headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Absa group owns majority stakes in banks in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania (Barclays Bank Tanzania and National Bank of Commerce), Uganda and Zambia.

Meanwhile, the Barclays Bank has operations in Egypt and Zimbabwe which are part of the bank's African business and run by Barclays Africa Group’s management.

Vermooten further told ITWeb Africa that there is different behaviour in terms of how customers have received the digital platforms across the various countries.

"In Egypt; for example, cash deposits are phenomenal on the device. Cash deposits don't happen in the branch they happen at the ATM.

"Similarly a country like Ghana is very enthusiastic about digital channels for banking. So when you look at daily registrations happening in that market its great," Vermooten noted.

“For the Zimbabwe market we are focused on building a money transfer system for transfers from South Africa to Zimbabwe,” he said.

Meanwhile, in South Africa Absa's banking application has already raked up 300,000 users since its launch in April last year.