Microsoft Explains how Africa’s Financial Landscape is Changing due to Digital Banking

According to Ola Williams, the Country Manager of Microsoft Nigeria, the financial sector on the African continent is accelerating its digital transformation agenda in an effort to provide customers with a unique customer experience, which is promoting economic development on the continent.

Williams stated that the financial services sector is witnessing a move towards open and linked ecosystems through the modernization of fundamental platforms, including payments and core banking systems, as part of the requirement for differentiated new experiences, risk management, and compliance.

She recalled how the world of banking and payments is becoming more open than ever before, with users benefiting from a wide selection of innovative and practical products.

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.”

A mature provider of financial service platforms is required by financial institutions, according to the Microsoft Nigeria Country Manager, in order to enable a modern banking environment that focuses on lowering end-to-end and capital expenditure while utilizing technology.

She stated that these institutions gain from working with a partner who would give them access to industry and digital advisories and who will collaborate with them as they transition from being a heritage traditional financial services organization to a digitally focused one.

She said that Microsoft upholds the toughest security and privacy standards in the business in order to give the financial sector the ability to manage its data footprint and establish its own governance and to create a safer society empowered by digital transformation.

“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.”