Standard Bank, Africa’s largest financial services institution, has officially entered the scaling phase of its artificial intelligence deployment across the continent, following a transformative partnership with Huawei that has already delivered substantial cost savings and operational improvements.
Speaking at the Huawei South Africa Connect 2026 conference at the Sandton Convention Centre, Khomotso Molabe, Standard Bank’s Chief Information Officer for Personal & Private Banking and Deputy Group Chief Information Officer, detailed the bank’s progress in a presentation titled “Beyond Cloud: Building a Resilient, Intelligent and Client Centred Bank.”
“Not only have we started executing part of that partnership a lot more earlier than we thought, we’ve actually unlocked a lot of value in that partnership,” Molabe told the audience.
The partnership, formalised through a memorandum of understanding signed in September 2024 during the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Beijing — which coincided with the South African state visit to China — has progressed faster than anticipated, according to Molabe.
Hybrid Cloud-First Strategy Across 21 African Markets
Standard Bank operates across 21 African countries, serving 20 million clients with diverse regulatory requirements and customer preferences.
The bank’s pan-African footprint presents unique complexity — unlike European institutions that operate under unified currency and regulatory frameworks, Standard Bank must navigate distinct market nuances across the continent.
The group operates in clountries such as home market of South Africa, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt, Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, etc.
“To address this, the bank adopted a hybrid cloud-first approach, beginning with infrastructure modernisation in South Africa across storage and database systems,” Molabe said.
“The initiative expanded to 10 countries throughout 2025, replacing legacy infrastructure stacks with Huawei solutions“with much better performance, with zero client impact.”
He added that the results have been remarkable: operating costs for the infrastructure stack in these countries decreased by between 40% and 60%.
Hub-and-Spoke Model to Replace 42 Data Centres
Building on this foundation, Standard Bank identified a new opportunity to fundamentally restructure its data centre architecture.
Historically, the bank maintained a primary data centre and a disaster recovery data centre in every country of operation.
“If it happens that we end up in 30 to 40 to 50 countries in the African continent, you can imagine that we can end up with 100 data centres in the African continent,” Molabe noted.
The solution: a hub-and-spoke model using Huawei Cloud.
Standard Bank now uses a hub-and-spoke modelprimarily for its corporate transaction banking, treasury, and digital client services. This centralised framework processes operations and consolidates data across multiple African and global markets
Services that can be centralised run from a hub, while client-facing services remain on the ground in each country, allowing local teams to respond nimbly to customer needs rather than having decisions dictated from Johannesburg.
“It allows us to have a hub where we can have all services that are common, consumed out of a Huawei public or private cloud infrastructure… equally, it allows us to put private cloud instances in specific countries where we have to comply with data residency requirements,” Molabe explained.
AI Scaling: Moving Beyond “Death by Use Case”
Standard Bank has declared itself past the experimental phase of AI adoption.
Molabe shared that the bank recently held an AI conference with 1,500 engineers to announce the transition to the scaling phase.
“I can declare now that we have declared that we are now past the use case by use case, death by use case stage. And we are now in the stage of scaling this solution because in the use cases that we have deployed, we have seen so much value,” he said.
Two concrete AI implementations demonstrate the impact:
In Nigeria, Standard Bank implemented Huawei’s Intelligent Call Centre solution, which has automated more than 50% of the tasks that contact centre agents “hate the most” — the preparation work before calls and case-closing work afterward.
Agents can now spend significantly more time engaging with customers.
The solution also removes the frustrating “press one for this, press two for that” phone menu experience.
“We’ve been able to leverage this technology to remove the press, press, press, so that we can listen in on the call and get the intent and be able to lead you to the appropriate place where you can be assisted, based on your articulation of problems to be solved,” Molabe said.
A similar solution has now been implemented in South Africa.
Africa’s Demographic Dividend and AI Opportunity
Molabe positioned the partnership within Africa’s broader trajectory.
The continent’s population of 1.3 to 1.4 billion is forecast to double by 2050, making it the youngest continent in the world.
“We believe that the adoption of AI in the African continent will have a net positive impact in the medium to long term,” Molabe stated.
“There’s certain unique African problems that the young people of this continent will find unique, innovative ways to solve those problems leveraging this technology”.
The Huawei partnership provides access to the computing power, large language models, and modern data platforms needed to leverage this opportunity.
A Blueprint for African Digital Transformation
Molabe concluded by emphasising that Standard Bank’s purpose — “Africa is our home, we drive her growth” — motivates the bank to share its blueprint with the broader business community.
“I believe that this blueprint that we have adopted in this partnership with Huawei can actually become an exemplary blueprint to all of you, whether you compete directly with us or whether you are in a different industry,” he said.
“When everybody succeeds in the African continent, it is part of us achieving our own purpose. It’s part of us contributing to the growth of this great continent”.
