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Digital Future

The digital environment also brings partnerships into the spotlight. Southey says that Absa has evaluated more than 800 partnership opportunities over the past 18 months, looking at ways to add value through collaboration and co-opetition.

“Partnerships are a massive part of our strategy, and we’ve become extremely deliberate about how we approach them,” he says. “As a bank, we know what we’re good at. We have a very good platform from which to launch apps, and a very strong customer-based brand. Fintechs, for example, typically don’t have that, but they can go narrow at solving a particular problem. That’s a capability that we would love to present to customers, and it’s where the partnership opportunity lies. As we continue to grow our platform and our customer base, the fintech gets access to scale with really good capability, and we launch that together.”

But ultimately, says Southey, it all comes down to the client or customer experience. “It’s how people are going to consume your products and processes,” he says, “whether that’s in an integrated world of APIs [application programming interfaces], or whether it’s about online experiences. Design is paramount in this digital world. We’ve already seen that in consumer apps: the successful ones all have great client experiences. Data is key to delivering that, as it enables you to mass-customise the digital experience.”

Southey may, at times, sound less like a banker and more like a techie, but that makes sense, given the direction the banking industry is taking. “The way Absa is evolving, we’re no longer just a bank,” he concludes. “Through our technological advancements, we could consider ourselves as a software company with banking as a service.”