Huawei, the global technology giant, has called for a “non-stop” digital future for Africa’s banking industry.
At the Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit for Africa 2023 held in Cape Town last week, the company announced a ‘Non Stop Banking’ initiative, which aims to foster hand-in-hand collaboration between the ICT and banking industries to facilitate a digital future of ‘non-stop’ services, ‘non-stop’ development, and ‘non-stop’ innovation.
In a keynote speech, Leo Chen, president of Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa, underscored the need for banks in Africa to embrace digitalisation, not only to broaden their customer base, but also to save operational costs, develop new products, and deepen customer relationships. Chen emphasised that digitisation also allows for greater financial inclusion in the continent.
While he lauded the innovative work done by many African banks in embracing digitalisation, Chen pointed out that all industry players need to go further to embrace the “non-stop” approach that will characterise the future of banking.
Huawei has already served more than 2500 financial customers in over 60 countries and regions, including 50 of the world’s top 100 banks. Chen said that Huawei technologies, such as its storage, fibre optic networks, IP networks, and data communication, enable “multi-domain collaboration” solutions for banks. Huawei’s storage and optical connection coordination (SOCC) solutions can reduce system switchover time from two minutes to two seconds after a network breakdown, ensuring zero transaction interruptions.
Its multilayer ransomware protection (MRP) technology can provide 6-layer protection, from storage to network to applications and other layers. It enables reliable and secure end-to-end protection to the whole system. Huawei’s intelligent network O&M solutions can detect faults in one minute, diagnose in three minutes, and rectify in five minutes.
Huawei Cloud, the world’s fastest-growing major cloud service provider, can support the hybrid multi-cloud service required by banks. Huawei’s digital energy solutions can help to provide an uninterrupted and green power supply for the banking sector, effectively addressing power deficit issues and supporting ‘non-stop’ banking.
Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei Global Digital Finance, said that financial services are becoming mobile and intelligent at a blistering pace.
“The financial industry should pay acute attention to users and their demands, embracing changes,” he said. “Huawei is dedicated to helping its African financial customers address challenges and accelerate changes across six fields: shifting from transaction to digital engagement, cloud-native and agile businesses, data democratisation, secure and reliable infrastructure, hybrid multi-cloud and Lego-style modular services, and automated and predictable operation.”
Beyond technology, Huawei issued a call for all parties in the industry to come together and build more robust ICT infrastructure, facilitate more measures and policies to encourage digital finance innovation, cultivate a sound innovative ecosystem, and train more digital talent for the industry. Huawei Cloud’s Spark programme, for example, has pledged to assist 1,000 SMEs over the next three years.
Having already trained more than 80,000 digital talents in Africa, the company has launched the ‘LEAP’ digital talent training programme in Sub-Saharan Africa region, aiming to train another 100.000 people in the next three years.