Sub-Saharan Africa’s banking sector has been urged to fully digitise in order to pull through the current COVID-19 pandemic and exploit post-pandemic opportunity.

This was one of the key takeaways from the 2020 Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Financial Services Industry Summit, hosted online recently. The Summit, themed Accelerating Digital Transformation, Enable Business growth Again attracted 1,200 delegates.

Bankers from the region, as well as China, participated and agreed that digitalisation will help amid the ongoing pandemic crisis, but also ensure sustainable growth within the post-COVID-19 era.

Liao Yong, vice president of Huawei Southern Africa region said advances in ICT present unique opportunities for the banking sector, especially when almost 70% of the region’s population do not have a bank account.

“All of these ICT advances will be critical enablers to a thriving banking sector in Sub-Saharan Africa. As we can see, the merging of these two curves of ICT and banking services is powerful. But how much we can unleash the power depends on how much and how soon banking sector goes digital,” said Yong.

Alex Siboe Wekunda, head of Digital Financial Services at Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB) said 97% of all transactions are done digitally, which has resulted in substantial growth during the pandemic.

Wekunda added: “We had invested in our platform, so we were able to handle the traffic that comes through this ecosystem.”

Chen Kunte, chief digital transformation officer of Global Financial Services in Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group said digitalisation will give the banking sector the resilience it needs in the public health crisis.

“We need to restructure banks’ ICT platforms from legacy architecture to cloud-based, open architecture by build AI-powered and data-driven platforms to expand the way financial institutions engage and interact with customers and accommodate more innovative business models and service scenarios,” said Kunte.

There is consensus among industry insiders that the rapid uptake of mobile technologies in the region has fuelled economic growth.

According to statistics from GSMA, 4G mobile broadband technology adoption will overtake 2G in 2023 and the total number of unique subscribers in Sub-Saharan Africa will reach 600 million by 2025, representing half the region’s population.