Afcacia

Huawei has announced its ‘Non-Stop Banking’ initiative at the Intelligent Finance Summit for Africa 2023, to ramp up collaboration between the ICT and banking industries. The plan seeks to facilitate a digital future characterised by ‘non-stop’ services, development and innovation.

The Summit brought together more than 200 professionals, including key industry opinion leaders, and executives from major banks across Africa.

In a keynote speech announcing the initiative, Leo Chen, President of Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Region spoke about the importance of going digital as a major imperative for the banking industry, in a bid to boost customer numbers, lower operational costs, develop new innovative products, raise revenue and deepen customer relationships.

Locally, where 25 percent of Kenyans prefer banking applications, he stated that there’s an even greater need for banks to embrace digitization, as it allows for greater financial inclusion. Lauding the innovative work done by many local banks in embracing digitization, he pointed out that all players in the industry need to go further if they’re to embrace the ‘non-stop’ approach that will characterise the future of banking.

“To accelerate digitalization of banking services, Huawei will facilitate to innovatively improve productivity in Africa by rolling out ICT infrastructure that delivers ‘non-stop’ financial services, and achieve ‘non-stop’ development alongside ’non-stop’ innovation,” said Leo, noting that the firm already serves more than 2500 financial customers in over 60 countries and regions, including 50 of the world’s top 100 banks.

Numerous Huawei technologies, Chen added, are helpful on this front. Over the years, it has provided the foundation and backbone for the digitalization of the banking industry locally by supporting the construction of ICT infrastructure and digital connectivity in rural areas. Its extensive focus on research and development (R&D), meanwhile, means that it’s well-poised to help the industry shape its future too.

Echoing his remarks, Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei Global Digital Finance pointed out that financial services are becoming mobile and intelligent at a blistering pace. The future of banking involves innovating ways to make a consumer’s daily life easier. Banks will have to create or select the right platforms that bring the most distinctive and personalized user experience.

From a technical perspective, he pointed to the necessary multi-domain collaboration technology for banks as storage, fibre optic networks, IP networks and data communication. These for instance cover storage and optical connection coordination (SOCC) to reduce system switchover time from two minutes to two seconds after a network breakdown, ensuring zero transaction interruptions.

It also includes a multilayer ransomware protection (MRP) that provides 6-layer protections enabling a reliable and secure ‘end-to-end’ protection to the whole bank’s system. He added that banks need an intelligent network that detects faults in 1 minute, diagnoses them in 3 minutes, and rectifies in 5 minutes.

He noted that banks are accelerating usage of Cloud services, with hybrid multi-cloud services required by banks becoming the norm, complemented by digital energy that provide an uninterrupted and green power supply, thereby effectively addressing power deficit issues and supporting ‘non-stop’ banking.

“The financial industry should pay acute attention to users and their demands, embracing changes,” he said. “Huawei is dedicated to helping its local banks address challenges and accelerate changes across six fields: shifting from transaction to digital engagement, cloud-native and agile businesses, data democratization, secure and reliable infrastructure, hybrid multi-cloud and Lego-style modular services, and automated and predictable operation.”