IBM – KigaliTech

Africa has made huge strides over the past decades towards the financial inclusion. The digitization and simplification of money management has especially proved to be a sturdy vehicle in making headway in this regard.

Yet, more work needs to be done as only 34 percent of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa have a bank account and 350 million people are still unbanked. In Kenya, financial inclusion as of August 2020 stands at 82.9%, an improvement from 26.7% in a decade, while the commercial banking industry is the fourth largest in Sub-Saharan Africa but there’s still room for growth.

Technology has been at the heart of financial inclusion in Africa and today we’re seeing how technology trends are evolving much faster than imagined. The pandemic has accelerated the pace, and we have seen digital transformation initiatives within the sector compressed from years to months.

Building the right platform

With the evolution of technology, banks are pivoting their platforms towards open ecosystems and the secure sharing of data with third-party applications from fintechs and online financial service vendors to increase access to banking services to the masses. The 2021 IBM CEO Study – that drew on input from 3,000 CEOs across 26 industries and nearly 50 countries – has found that such ‘platformification’ of banks is here to stay.

Home to over 150 fintech companies, Kenya has one of the biggest and most developed fintech ecosystems in the African continent, owning to the proliferation of mobile phones and the rise of mobile money alongside technologies such as hybrid cloud and AI to name a few.

Innovation through a secure cloud

In highly regulated industries like the financial services sector, increasing financial inclusion for the unbanked is a juggling act between security and compliance together with innovation, and hybrid cloud is the answer to the conundrum.

Hybrid cloud can help banks and fintechs cope with the hurdles of compliance, security, and innovation while meeting customer expectations and venturing into new services. As banks become platform providers, hybrid cloud adoption lowers the total cost of technology ownership and improves operational efficiency – promoting innovation, aiding in the development of new business models and supporting more fulfilling customer engagements.

While the cloud offers clear advantages to banks and most are actively using cloud services, few have actually moved mission-critical regulated workloads to the cloud to date. In many cases, this has been due to concerns about whether cloud environments complied with stringent security and regulatory requirements.

Meeting industry requirements

If banks are going to guard against fraud and criminal activity while delivering on their promises to digitally sophisticated customers, they have to build their platforms on technology solutions designed to meet regulations of the financial service industry.

In response to this, IBM launched Cloud for Financial Services – a financial sector specific cloud offering – which features built-in security, regulatory and compliance controls that help minimize risks for banks integrating with third party independent service vendors (ISVs), fintechs and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers.

IBM has also been investing in confidential computing research and technologies for over a decade, and the solutions provide greater assurance that data is protected and visible only to its owner and no one else. This means banks can now be as compliant on the cloud as they are within their own data centers, and they can demonstrate compliance on a continuous basis.

As we continue in the journey to financially include more of our people across the African continent, the future of banking across Africa is dynamic and exciting.

With the right technology partner such as IBM and being cloud-ready, financial services institutions can build a strong ecosystem of partners – be it fintechs, startups – to offer an array of services at a quick pace and lower cost to entice the unbanked to the digital economy.

Caroline Mukiira is the General Manager, IBM East Africa

IBM and Verizon have a long and successful history of collaboration, built on a shared vision to drive continuous innovation for consumers and businesses in all industries. Therefore IBM is delighted to announce the next major step in their partnership. Verizon has chosen IBM and Red Hat to help build and deploy an open hybrid cloud platform with automated operations and service orchestration as the foundation of its 5G core.

This work with Verizon comes at a critical time for the telco industry as telcos position to deliver on the fundamental transformation potential of 5G. With increased bandwidth, reduced latency and cloud native capabilities, telcos now have the opportunity to leverage their unique and trusted role in communications to capture value from enterprise 5G adoption.

Why is this so crucial right now? Because it’s the kind of platform transformation that enables telcos to play a leading role in bringing connectivity and compute together for the 5G era. And the value that can be driven from this is clear, as 91% of high performing CSPs surveyed by the IBM Institute for Business Value expect to outperform their current financial expectations in five years as a result of using 5G-enabled edge computing. In simple terms, telcos must become platform businesses, or face competing with them.

Think about the rate and pace of innovation we are all experiencing, including heath care – evolving from telehealth doctor visits to network enabled remote surgeries. Or consider factory workers who can now gain access to video and real-time, augmented reality tools to improve quality and yields while they predict maintenance and repair needs before they happen. Or complex modern power grids that can support clean energy and more intelligent, real-time monitoring via 5G-enabled sensors. All of these innovations must be powered by agile network platforms that can support AI and data intensive use cases as low latency edge computing moves closer to where data is created and captured.

Verizon is a great example of a communication services provider that is on the forefront of this transformation, by embracing an open hybrid cloud platform that enables a world-class operations environment, aligned to their next-gen vision of an intelligent, highly automated and efficient 5G network. With this transformation, they can scale and deploy new services across a variety of environments, speeding innovation that delivers new value to customers.

By working with Red Hat and IBM Global Business Services (GBS) to build their 5G core network services on Red Hat OpenShift, Verizon is evolving to an open, cloud-native, containerized webscale platform that is ready to harness innovative applications that can support advanced 5G use cases. This open hybrid cloud foundation is designed to help them draw on the power of the immense up-stream open source community, while retaining the architectural control necessary to speed new features, offerings and services like network slicing and multi-access edge computing to market. And they can retain choice over what cloud (public or private), on-prem or Edge environment is best to deploy these solutions.

IBM Global Business Services, a leading systems integrator in the telco industry, is also integrating Telco Network Cloud solutions into Verizon’s Service Orchestration Platform to automate and manage services much more efficiently. This integration is designed to improve the service quality, predictably and automation of virtual network functions and comply with Open Network Automation Platform interfaces.

Taken together, today’s news is an enormous step forward in how IBM is supporting Verizon’s position as a network-as-a-service leader in 5G. With this approach, Verizon gains more control over how they choose to drive new value for their customers. They have flexibility in how and where they move their data, and what tools and technologies they choose to develop these emerging 5G-enabled business solutions.

We all know change and opportunity go hand in hand, and Verizon has long embraced forward thinking – especially now, when the industry is racing to create and capture new value as the market adopts 5G. As we look towards a future with 5G, IBM and Red Hat are deeply engaged, and working hand in hand with leading telecom operators all over the globe, to co-create and deliver open hybrid cloud platform solutions that will enable them – and the enterprises they serve – to thrive in this next era that combines the power of “connectivity + compute.”

www.ibm.com