Absa Bank Partners Huawei For Digital Transformation

Absa Bank Kenya has selected Huawei to build a cloud-based network between its headquarters and branches.

According to a use case report by Huawei, the digital transformation will help it meet the changing needs of customers who now prefer to access services digitally and not through branches.

“We strive to offer our customers a seamless digital experience. We want to enable them to bank and transact without any hitch and in a seamless manner at the convenience of whatever they could be. To realize that, the bank needed to build a new infrastructure to improve the efficiency of various banking services, reduce O&M costs, and enhance user experience at branches,” said Moses Okundi, CIO of Absa Bank Kenya.

According to Absa Kenya, they settled on Huawei’s SD-WAN solution to meet its service expansion and digital innovation requirements during its digital upgrade.

“We got to a point where we can manage traffic and distribute traffic evenly across various technology options or connectivity options from various connectivity providers. The value of this is that it gives us robust resilience in managing that connectivity,” added Okundi.

In the future, the Bank says its branch network will have intelligent traffic steering capability. It means the network can dynamically select MPLS links or internet links based on application quality and MPLS link quality, to ensure that key services use links with good quality.

In addition, Huawei provides the iMaster NCE-Campus O&M platform for Absa Kenya, which can display the key O&M quality of devices, applications, and traffic. This platform can visualize application traffic of all branches, and therefore allows the IT team to monitor the dynamic data and adjust the bandwidth of each branch in a timely manner. This brings efficient and intelligent operations.

Okundi explained: “For my tech team, we now have a very good level of visibility regarding the usage of the connectivity partners we have engaged. We are able to see where the usage is and how the traffic is distributed. And in the worst-case scenario where manual intervention is required, our team can pinpoint the challenges, making their intervention very accurate and efficient.”

Absa Bank Kenya’s also revealed its intelligent cloud-based branch network will serve as a critical foundation for the financial giant’s digital transformation.

“I see it as Lego blocks where the bottom layer is a strong technology foundation that gives us a platform to really offer cutting-edge digital solutions to our customers. And right at the bottom layer is strong connectivity,” Okundi expounded.

According to Okundi, “In the future, this powerful branch network will further promote the intelligent upgrade of Absa Bank and eventually help them evolve into intelligent customer experience centres. This digital foundation will continue to support the business expansion and innovation of Absa Bank Kenya to provide the most advanced and the best financial services to Kenya’s customers and enterprises.”

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