Huawei at its ‘Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit for Africa 2023’ announced its ‘Non-Stop Banking’ initiative that calls for hand-in-hand collaboration between the ICT and banking industries to facilitate a digital future for Africa’s banking industry.
“Going digital has become such a major imperative for the banking industry,” Leo Chen, president of Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Region, said in his Keynote Speech at the Summit. “Not only does it make it easier for banks to broaden their customer base, but it also saves operational costs, allows them to develop new products, and deepens the customer relationship, thus generating revenues for banks.”
While Mr. Chen lauded the innovative work done by many African 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 Banking approach that will characterize the future of banking. He goes on to add that “In Africa, there’s an even greater imperative for banks to embrace digitization, as it allows for greater financial inclusion.”
Over the years, Huawei Technologies has provided the foundation and backbone for the digitalization of the banking industry in Africa by supporting the construction of the continent’s ICT infrastructure and digital connectivity in rural areas. The company has already served more than 2,500 financial customers in over 60 countries (Uganda Inclusive) and regions, including 50 of the world’s top 100 banks.
In his Keynote Speech, Mr. Chen briefly touched on the technical perspective —pointing out that Huawei’s strength in storage, fiber optic networks, IP networks, and data communication enables ‘multi-domain collaboration’ solutions for banks. He gave an example of the multilayer ransomware protection (MRP) technology, which can provide 6-layer protections, from storage to network, to applications and other layers —enabling reliable and secure end-to-end protection to the whole system.
More on a technical perspective, Mr. Chen said 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.
Mr. Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei Global Digital Finance noted that with all this technology from Huawei in place including its intelligent Network O&M Solutions that enable faults to be detected in a minute, diagnosed & rectified in less than five minutes, Huawei Cloud that supports the hybrid multi-cloud service required by banks, and Huawei Digital Energy that provides an uninterrupted and green power supply —is so important to the industry —pointing out that financial services are becoming mobile and intelligent at a blistering pace.
“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 democratization, secure and reliable infrastructure, hybrid multi-cloud and Lego-style modular services, and automated and predictable operation,” said Mr. Cao. “In this way, Huawei will facilitate financial digitalization and innovatively improve productivity in Africa.”
He further adds that “Revolving around stability, agility, and intelligence, Huawei aims to build ‘non-stop’ financial services, and achieve ‘non-stop’ development alongside ’non-stop’ innovation.”
While concluding his remarks, Cao said the financial industry should pay acute attention to users and their demands, and embrace changes.
Huawei issued a call for all parties in the industry to come together and build a 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.
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