JOHANNESBURG – Standard Bank, Africa's largest financial services institution, has officially entered the expansion phase of its artificial intelligence deployment across the continent, following an innovative partnership with Huawei that has already delivered significant cost savings and operational improvements.
Speaking at the Huawei South Africa Connect 2026 conference held at the Sandton Convention Center, Standard Bank's Chief Information Officer, Personal & Private Banking and Deputy Group Chief Information Officer, Homotso Molave, detailed the bank's progress in a presentation titled “Beyond the Cloud: Building a Resilient, Intelligent, and Customer-Centric Bank''.
“Not only have we started implementing parts of the partnership much earlier than we expected, but we've actually gotten a lot of value out of it,” Molave told the audience.
Molave said the partnership, which was formalized through a memorandum of understanding signed during the China-Africa Cooperation Forum held in Beijing in September 2024 (coinciding with South Africa's state visit to China), has progressed faster than expected.
Hybrid cloud-first strategy across 21 African markets
Standard Bank operates in 21 African countries, serving 20 million customers with varying regulatory requirements and customer preferences.
The bank's pan-African expansion has unique complexities, with Standard Bank having to navigate the nuances of different markets across the continent, unlike European financial institutions that operate under a unified monetary and regulatory framework.
The group operates in countries including South Africa, where it is based, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt, Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania.
“To address this, the bank adopted a hybrid cloud-first approach, starting with infrastructure modernization across South Africa's storage and database systems,” Molave said.
“Through 2025, this initiative expanded to 10 countries and replaced our legacy infrastructure stack with Huawei solutions, resulting in significantly improved performance and zero impact to our clients.”
He added that the results were amazing, with operational costs of infrastructure stacks in these countries decreasing by 40% to 60%.
Hub-and-spoke model to replace 42 data centers
Building on this foundation, Standard Bank identified new opportunities to fundamentally reimagine its data center architecture.
Previously, the bank maintained a primary data center and a disaster recovery data center in every country in which it operated.
“If we were to be based in 30 to 40 to 50 countries on the African continent, you can imagine 100 data centers on the African continent,” Molave said.
The solution is a hub-and-spoke model using Huawei Cloud.
Standard Bank currently uses a hub-and-spoke model primarily for corporate transaction banking, treasury, and digital client services.
This centralized framework processes operations and integrates data across multiple African and global markets.
Centralized services run from the hub, but customer-facing services remain on-site in each country, allowing local teams to respond nimbly to customer needs rather than making decisions from Johannesburg.
“This allows us to have a hub where all common services consumed from Huawei's public or private cloud infrastructure can be leveraged. Similarly, it also allows us to locate private cloud instances in specific countries where we need to comply with data residency requirements,” Molave explained.
AI Scaling: Beyond “death-by-use cases”
Standard Bank has declared that it is past the experimental stage of AI implementation.
Molave shared that the bank recently held an AI conference with 1,500 engineers to announce the move to the scaling phase.
“We can now declare that we are past the use-case-by-use-case death stage,” he said.
“And we're now in the stage of scaling this solution because we've seen so much value in the use cases we've deployed.”
Two specific AI implementations illustrate the impact.
In Nigeria, Standard Bank deployed Huawei's intelligent call center solution to automate more than 50% of contact center agents' “most hated” tasks: pre-call preparation and subsequent case closure.
Agents can now spend significantly more time engaging with customers.
This solution also eliminates the frustrating “Press 1 to do this, press 2 to do that” phone menu experience.
“We were able to leverage this technology to filter out media outlets, allowing us to listen to calls, understand their intent, and direct them to the right place to get help based on the clarity of the problem to be solved,” Molave said.
A similar solution was introduced in South Africa.
Africa’s demographic dividend and AI opportunities
Molave positioned this partnership within Africa's broader trajectory.
The continent's population of 1.3 to 1.4 billion is expected to double by 2050, making it the world's youngest continent.
“We believe that the adoption of AI on the African continent will have a net positive impact in the medium to long term,” Molave said.
“Africa has unique challenges, and the continent's young people will find unique and innovative ways to leverage this technology to solve those problems.”
Our partnership with Huawei provides access to the computing power, large-scale language models, and modern data platforms needed to take advantage of this opportunity.
Africa’s digital transformation blueprint
Mr. Molave concluded by stressing that Standard Bank's purpose of “Africa is our home and we drive Africa's growth” motivates the bank to share its blueprint with the broader business community.
“We believe that this blueprint that we have adopted in our partnership with Huawei will actually be an exemplary blueprint for all of you, whether you compete directly with us or are in a different industry,” he said.
“Everyone’s success on the African continent is part of what we have achieved for ourselves and part of what we have contributed to the growth of this great continent.”
*This article was first published in our sister publication techfinancials.co.za.
