The Absa Group’s H1 2026 technology performance shows a clear shift from digital investment to measurable business and customer outcomes.
Using technology allows the group to make banking faster and more reliable, expand access to credit, scale personalised digital value and strengthen operational resilience.
The bank has reduced friction for customers, including a 98,96% reduction in SME account-opening time and faster credit decisioning.
It has maintained reliability and trust, with 99,97%, group service availability, zero severity incidents and more than 33 000 credential compromises prevented.
“Technology only matters when it changes the experience of customers and the performance of the business,” says Johnson Idesoh, Absa Group’s chief information and technology officer. “In H1 2026, we saw that impact clearly: SMEs can open accounts in minutes, customers are receiving faster credit decisions, digital lending is growing strongly, service channels are becoming more responsive, and our platforms continue to operate with resilience.
This is how we are scaling technology at Absa: not as a back-office function, but as a strategic engine for growth, trust and better customer outcomes across Africa.”
The most immediate impact is being felt in speed and simplicity. In Business Banking, straight-through processing has scaled-up SME customer onboarding, reducing turnaround time from two days to under 30 minutes (achieving a 98,96% reduction in time) and enabling clients to transact immediately. Credit decisioning has accelerated through reducing financial spreading turnaround time from 2-5 days to just 4 hours, resulting in up to 97% improvement, enabling faster access to credit and increased offer take-up rates.
Service experience is also improving. Amazon Connect has enabled contact-centre response times up to 21% faster, handling time improved by 14% per call and reduced call holding time by 44%.
The use of AI chatbots, at the customer facing level, have delivered early results. Absa’s Agentic AI based chat bot understands natural language, asks clarifying questions and delivers personalised data driven answers. On average the chat bot handles over 100 000 queries per month from approximately 1,6-million users. In addition, our Business Banking capability supports 11 official languages with plans to extend this offering to other parts of the business.
In H1 430 000 new members joined Absa Rewards and participation in the rewards programme grew by 21%, supported by enhanced app functionality that helps customers unlock more value from their banking relationship.
The group is scaling digital capability across its African footprint in ways that respond to local customer needs. In Ghana, the Ghana Pay platform has 18 064 active wallet holders (90 day active) and has processed approximately GHS 6,6-million through its funds transfer functionality, with 217 293 customers using the service as of July 2026.
Behind these customer-facing improvements, Absa is modernising the enterprise platforms that enable faster execution and better decision making. The Group has consolidated customer information from 32 systems into a single AI-enabled customer master data management platform, creating a more integrated view of customers and accelerating data-led value across the organisation. In debt review, due to AI, process effectiveness improved from 28% to 90%, helping more customers access financial relief and support more efficiently.
Every colleague, whether back office or client facing, spends far too much valuable time focusing on manual and repetitive tasks. By empowering them with the use of AI capabilities, their roles are not being replaced, instead they are being amplified, automating the mundane so they can focus on high impact decisions and deeper customer relationships. Over 30 000 employees are using Microsoft Co-pilot every month, which has unlocked meaningful productivity gains across the organisation, while more than 4 400 colleagues with access to Copilot Pro are already building personal automation agents to streamline their day-to-day workflows, with over 3 800 such agents now live in production.
Technology teams are also empowered, with more than 1 400 developers leveraging AI-assisted coding tools, including GitHub Copilot and Claude Code, accelerating development cycles and enabling us to bring new products to market with greater speed.