AFRICA: DATA
g n i t i r w Re th e payments st or y
Standard Bank’s Sajid Gani believes if traditional banks want to take the fight to Africa’s new challengers, they must first understand what transactions are telling them “Data always tells a story, if you look for the story,” observes Sajid Gani, head of operations for corporate and investment banking South Africa at Standard Bank. “You have to analyse what the data is telling you, because this will reveal a story, and the most important story to look for is that of your client. What is that story in terms of operational efficiencies, or lack of them? And, consequently, how do you use these insights to make an informed decision that will help you better service your client?” If banks can listen to those important narratives, he believes they can write
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a new chapter in their history on the African continent. If not, there’s every possibility they’ll be toast. Gani has seen a slew of competitors enter the market offering speedy, uninterrupted and cheap payment services to huge swathes of the population who hitherto had no or limited access to mainstream financial services, and among whom there is widespread mistrust of banks. “With new tech-enabled players, like PayPal, Apple, Google, Facebook, Ripple and other cryptocurrency and distributed ledger providers, and new digital banks providing not only seamless payments, but transparency and cost-effectiveness, too, the writing is on the wall for traditional banks,” says Gani. That is unless they to wake up to the transformational power that granular data has to improve the customer payment journey and internal processes. And he can point to his own bank’s work with data specialist Intix to demonstrate that. He believes it has provided a blueprint for
operational excellence that other banks could follow, and has allowed Standard Bank to be the author of its own success
THE AFRICAN CHALLENGE Standard Bank isn’t an outlier. One of Africa’s oldest banks and its largest by assets, it faces the same global challenges as its rivals. But some of them have failed to adapt to the reality of the payments landscape in Africa and the difficulties millions face, believes Gani. Take cross-border payments. They are a vital local income source, given Africa’s huge number of migrant workers wanting to send desperately-needed funds home quickly to their families. And yet the US $46billion-plus of remittances that cross sub-Saharan Africa every year are subject to some of the highest transaction fees in the world. “Cross-border transfer has to obviously be done at an extremely low cost. Migrant workers tend not to earn that much www.fintechf.com
