2018 payment trends in SA
Technology will continue to drive the ways we make payments--but we must take African economic realities into account. By David Noel Lardin, vice-president digital payment for the CISMEA region at Gemalto. Technology developments will continue to revolutionise payment...
Naomi Snyman chairs SA Financial Blockchain Consortium
Standard Bank's blockchain lead Naomi Snyman has been appointed to the prominent position of chairperson of the South African Financial Blockchain Consortium. Snyman says blockchain has enormous potential to redefine the financial services landscape, but to do this...
Banking in the era of modern marketing
Banks are experiencing a midlife crisis. They desperately want to transform and become digitally enabled but they are being hamstrung by legacy systems, data silos and disjointed marketing and organisational cultures that don't lend themselves to agility - a key...
New tool puts customers in the centre
Standard Bank has rolled out a new online tool to assist merchants countrywide to change the paradigm of customer interaction. The bank completed a highly successful pilot phase of its new online dashboard tool CustomerView across 12 clients in October and November...
FMI gains speed, agility with Lenovo ThinkSystems
The insurance business is fast-paced and dynamic, so IT must provide fast processing and storage that’s both available and easy to manage. When Durban-based insurer FMI needed to refresh its existing IBM systems, it turned to long-time partner Network Configurations...
Technologies set to change life insurance
The South African life insurance industry is seen as one of the most innovative life cover sectors in the world. There are major technological developments on the international front that offer our industry the opportunity to cement its global status and to match...
Personalised insurance must be embraced
Risk pooling is as old as insurance itself. But how will the emergence of personalised premiums, based on individual analysis, gained from data-driven solutions, impact on it? Kelly Preston, data analytics manager at SilverBridge, discusses the evolution happening in...
Open banking’s relevance to SA
Imagine if you owned your bank data and could decide who you want to share this data with, thereby gaining access to a broad range of products to suit your needs. Matthew Barnard, an executive at software development company BBD, explains this could become a reality...
Virgin Money makes EFT a thing of the past
Virgin Money has launched a new peer-to-peer payment application, Virgin Money Spot. Virgin Money Spot makes sending and requesting money from friends as easy as sending a text message. Users simply download the app, link their Internet-enabled card from any South...
Data still the biggest obstacle in insurance
Insurers have many bespoke solutions to meet the diverse requirements of their customer base. To develop these, they utilise systems such as enterprise resource planning and broker and claims management to pull data together from many disparate sources. But herein...
Embracing automation in insurance
The mere mention of the word automation instils fear in the hearts of most employees. But it does not have to be the case. Automation in the workplace can lead to significant opportunities across the insurance value chain. By Jaco Swanepoel, CEO of SilverBridge...
Financial services looks to mobile-first
Rapid technological innovation and the emergence of more stringent regulations means that banks are having to reinvent themselves as trusted providers of a much broader range of financial services, delivered securely to consumers primarily via mobile technology. The...