South Africa has four banking MVNOs (Capitec Connect, FNB Connect, Standard Bank Connect and Nedbank Connect), and they’re all essentially running the exact same playbook. The logic is simple enough: use a mobile product to deepen the banking relationship, gather behavioural data between transactions and create sticky switching costs as a customer’s financial life grows….
Nonhlanhla Mdletshe, executive for cash for product at Absa Business Banking South Africa’s banking sector is likely to undergo significant change as the industry moves towards faster payments, shared infrastructure and greater interoperability, according to Nonhlanhla Mdletshe, executive for cash product at Absa Business Banking. Speaking to ITWeb, Mdletshe said the shift towards real-time payments…
Chipo Mushwana, Nedbank’s executive for payments and technology AI agents are already initiating financial transactions on behalf of people, and South African banks were not built for that. That was the central warning at Nedbank’s Innovation Day in Johannesburg last week, where banking and technology leaders said the industry’s biggest blind spot is not AI…
Every South African bank that has launched a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) – Capitec, FNB, Standard Bank, Nedbank and soon Absa – has built its mobile business on phone numbers it does not control. The international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) embedded in every Sim card belongs to the host network. The phone number –…
Absa Group CITO Johnson Idesoh Johnson Idesoh, group chief information and technology officer at Absa, says AI in all its forms – generative, agentic and the AI now being wielded by cybercriminals – is the single biggest topic on his desk, but cautions that it remains a tool that has to be tied directly to…
Standard Bank Group’s Simon Just Standard Bank has come out in defence of a market-led approach to open banking in South Africa that the Reserve Bank recently criticised, while the fintech industry is calling for more regulation. In March, the Reserve Bank released a working paper (PDF) arguing that South Africa’s market-driven approach to open…
The author, Absa’s Lindelani Ramukumba Rewind just a few years and large language models and generative AI were barely on the public radar. Yet the technology has already evolved into its next iteration: agentic AI, a new breed of systems that are semi- or fully autonomous and able to reason and act on their own….
A new paper by the Reserve Bank argues that South Africa’s market-driven approach to open banking is limited in its reach. In fact, it risks entrenching the same socioeconomic barriers that have locked large sections of the population out of the financial system. The newly published working paper (PDF) argues that a regulated approach is…
NSIA Group is restructuring its financial services business with the creation of NSIA Holding Financière, a new entity designed to centralize its banking and financial activities. The move follows a strategic reorganization launched in 2025 aimed at improving operational coordination and supporting expansion across African financial markets. The group said the new structure will serve…
Standard Bank’s Bill Blackie Standard Bank has rolled out a substantially upgraded business banking platform that shifts greater control to customers, allowing businesses to manage their own electronic payment limits, user entitlements and fraud protections without calling a relationship manager. The R1-billion re-platforming project, built in collaboration with vendor Backbase, represents the bank’s bid to…
