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Balancing gains and pains: the on-the-ground realities and practical support. How do African businesses turn a trade vision into a profitable reality? This final, action-oriented episode focuses on the on-the-ground realities of AfCFTA implementation, addressing critical challenges and detailing the practical support available to businesses, particularly SMMEs.

More than just tariffs: unlocking opportunities in services and investment. Ready to move beyond borders? This episode dives deep into the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), exploring the immense opportunities in services and investment that extend far beyond simple import tariff reductions over the next decade.

Navigating the new trade deal. Ready to unlock a market of 1.3 billion people? This foundational episode of "Africa Trade Unlocked" is your essential guide to the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), often hailed as the world's largest free trade area since the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

James Stirling, Head of Liquidity Product, Absa CIB and Lumnandi Dambuza, Head of Liquidity: Africa Regional Office, Absa CIB, explore the changing demands on corporate treasurers, and the cash management solutions available.

International payments are the connective tissue of the global economy – enabling trade, investment, and capital mobility across borders. Yet despite their central role in the financial system, they remain stubbornly expensive and complex, creating real friction in the flow of capital and affecting everything from multinational supply chains to individual remittances.

Despite a year characterised by economic uncertainty and understandable prudence, investor confidence is returning to Africa, with the continent being hailed as an attractive pivot point for investors reeling from policy shifts in the Global North

Chris Paizis, Head of Client FX and International Banking, Absa CIB, provides a battle plan for corporate treasurers in the current “warlike” environment of global trade.

International payments are the connective tissue of the global economy – enabling trade, investment, and capital mobility across borders. Yet despite their central role in the financial system, they remain stubbornly expensive and complex, creating real friction in the flow of capital and affecting everything from multinational supply chains to individual remittances.

Africa’s payment ecosystem has long been defined by accessibility. In many markets, millions of people operated outside the formal banking system, relying on cash or informal transfers to move money.

There is no shortage of hype around the promise of the African Continental Free Trade Area, often framed as a ready-made substitute for the export markets Africa risks losing under shifting U.S. trade policy. The tariff wave under the Trump administration was a harsh – though in many ways inevitable – lesson in how fragile a trade model becomes when it leans too heavily on a few dominant markets.

The Absa Macro and Risk Management Conference underscores Absa’s commitment to helping clients make sense of global volatility and translate it into actionable African strategy. By convening world-class thinkers, the conference challenges institutional investors and corporate leaders to look beyond the noise of tariffs, wars, and economic turbulence — and focus on long-term opportunities for growth, resilience, and regional collaboration.

A few years ago, a major family-owned enterprise in South Africa’s consumer goods sector began a phased transition towards Islamic aligned financing. This strategic decision grounded not in cost, but in conviction signalled to financial institutions that all future lending would need to comply with Islamic values giving them time to develop suitable products.