How digital banking is transforming financial landscape in Africa — Microsoft

The Country Manager of Microsoft Nigeria, Ola Williams, has stated that in its quest to deliver a different customer experience services, the financial sector in the African continent, are expediting their digital transformation agenda, thereby helping in driving economic prosperity within the continent.

Williams noted that as part of the need for differentiating new experiences, risk management and compliance, that the financial services industry is seeing the shift towards open and interconnected ecosystems through modernisation of core platforms including payments and core banking systems.
Banking and payments are becoming more environment open than ever before, with customers benefiting from a huge range of new and useful products, she recounted.
This, according to her, is enabled by Banking as a Service (BaaS), which offers an ecosystem in which licensed financial institutions integrate their banking services directly into the products of non-bank businesses.
“And connected BaaS provides the ability to manage an ecosystem of partners from recruitment, licensing, part­nering and referrals.
“BaaS built in the Cloud enables security, compliance and governance fully enabled, integrated and automated seamlessly across the entire services platform.
“BaaS removes many of the barriers that businesses previously faced when trying to launch or integrate financial products and unlocks banking.
“A trusted platform is the foundation for running financial services in the cloud, and organisations that continu­ously develop to stay at the forefront of technology will become the digital leaders of the future and maintain their competitive edge.”
Financial institutions, the Microsoft Nigeria Country Manager advised, need a mature provider of financial service platforms to enable a modern banking ecosystem with a focus on reducing end-to-end and capital expenditure while leveraging technology.
These institutions, she re­marked, benefit from having a partner who will provide them with industry and digital advisories, as well as who will partner with them in the process of moving from being a legacy traditional financial services organisation to one that is digitally focused.
She explained that to cre­ate a safer world empowered by digital transformation, Microsoft adheres to the strictest security and privacy standards in the industry so as to enable the financial sector to manage its data footprint and create its own governance.
“At Microsoft, understand­ing the financial services industry’s needs and objectives is very important to us. We want to ensure that every organisation has the digital capability required to succeed going forward and are committed to helping our financial services customers improve time to value, reduce costs, increase agility, and accelerate innova­tion for sustainable growth.”
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