South Africa’s largest retail bank by clientele ABSA says it is planning to makeover its website and introduce a mobile app early next year.

ABSA, which has a customer base just over 12 million customers in South Africa and is a subsidiary of Barclays, plans to launch its new website called ABSA Online and app at a time when competition is fierce among the country’s financial institutions in the digital space.

Banks such First National Bank and Standard Bank have launched mobile apps, while Nedbank’s app has also been unveiled this month.

But ABSA says it plans to unveil a number of banking firsts in South Africa, including Web 2.0 style personalisation, easy navigation, visually-rich graphs and calculators to “provide a consolidated, dashboard view of one's personal finances.”

Arrie Rautenbach, ABSA head of Retail Markets, said, “ABSA Online is also fully-optimised for Apple and Samsung tablet devices - giving our customers access to the widest range of banking services among any of the tablet applications or tablet-optimised web interfaces in South Africa.

"Our banking app will not only mirror this functionality, but also bring a competitive set of new features to tablets and smartphones from early 2013," said Rautenbach.