This week I found myself fixated on Investec winning Best Private Bank in Africa for Technology at the FT Wealth Tech Awards 2026.
I wondered what Investec’s win suggests about the Big Five banks – FNB, Standard, Nedbank, Absa, and especially the mass market bank Capitec. These top South African banks are spending above inflation on IT, with budgets hitting the billions of rand. Yet where’s the real return?
Are these banks throwing billions at digital projects while somehow missing the point entirely?
Too often, these investments are what experts call “bolt-on” – adding flashy new features to creaking old systems without fixing what’s underneath. Evidence of this “bolt-on” is everywhere in the Big Five. They still have banking apps that don’t really know the client.
While digging deeper into the anomaly, I found out why Investec was the best in Africa.
The answer was obvious: Investec isn’t using tech for “the sake” of doing so.
Fani Titi, the Investec Group CEO, put it plainly in the latest integrated annual report:
“AI is part of our continuous evolution for enhanced client journeys.
“In positioning our business for an era in which human intelligence is complemented by machine intelligence, we see meaningful opportunity to improve productivity, insight and client experience.
“Our approach is to use technology to augment human expertise, not replace the judgement and care that defines our brand.”
Fani Titi, the Investec Group CEO. iMAGE SOURCE Transform SA
Let that sink in – read it again. Augment, not replace.
While our mass-market banks are busy trying to automate everything and cut human contact to save costs, Investec is doing the opposite.
Investec uses AI-enabled banking functions so the staff can focus on complex work and genuine client relationships.
The numbers speak for themselves at Investec: more than 800 agents actively use AI, freeing up over 350,000 hours every year; time that is now spent dealing with clients, rather than on admin. By using AI, Investec is compressing corporate onboarding from days to hours for simple admin tasks, and from weeks to days for complex ones.
Relationship managers at Investec have access to instant client insights using natural language queries. Investec is also automating document-heavy work across legal and compliance. These are practical AI tools that make life easier for clients and staff alike.
In the latest group integrated annual report, Lyndon Subroyen, their Global Head of Digital and Technology, said: “When you take the best of our people and add the best of our tech, you create the ‘moments of magic’ that make all the difference.”
Lyndon Subroyen. IMAGE SOURCE: FinTech Alliance
That is the lesson local banks keep failing.
Magic doesn’t come from better algorithms. It comes from empowering the best people with better tools.
Investec is also smart about using AI. The bank isn’t just buying expensive software and hoping for the best.
In April 2026, Investec launched a practical AI adoption programme for staff, combining bite-sized daily learning with drop-in sessions. The bank is teaching staff how to use these AI tools safely and effectively, without undermining human judgement. Investec is embarking on an organisation-wide honest conversation about how work is changing and how staff can adapt.
That’s culture change, not just tech change.
Investec Group CEO, Titi, also made it clear that AI is not a standalone stunt.
He stressed that it’s central to their ambition, and they’re now ramping up their work to deliver measurable value at scale.
Now look at the big five banks. They have the money. They have the scale. But they are seemingly trapped in a cycle of spending big on tech while clinging to outdated operating models.
It seems the Big Five banks treat digital transformation as an IT project, rather than a business overhaul.
Available data indicates that these banks invest in fragments, hoping the pieces will somehow fit together.
The risk is that they keep investing heavily without fundamentally rethinking their approach, leaving them vulnerable to nimbler competitors – fintechs.
Failing to deliver the seamless, personalised experiences customers increasingly expect compounds the problem.
You simply can’t buy your way out of a broken model.
Investec’s success isn’t about being a private bank for the wealthy. It’s about a philosophy that any bank, including Capitec with its massive mass-market reach, could adopt.
The philosophy is straightforward: use tech to make your people extraordinary, not to make them redundant.
It makes sense to free staff from doing admin tasks so they can do the brilliant stuff.
When you improve client experience and free up your best talent to do meaningful work, revenue and loyalty grow.
