Author: Staff Writer

Communications and Digital Technologies Minister, Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, has announced that R27 billion has been pledged by operators and vendors to usher in 5G fibre technologies in South Africa. The Minister said this when she tabled the department’s budget vote during a mini plenary of the National Assembly on Tuesday. “We believe that partnerships and collaborations are key to taking our sector to greater heights. “I am therefore pleased to announce that R27 billion is being pledged collectively by the operators and vendors to expand the 4G network, and to deploy the 5G and fibre technologies in South Africa, which has…

Discovery Bank today launched a Friend Referral Rewards, bringing more of the benefits of shared-value banking to existing and new clients. The referral programme, the first of its kind among South African banks and financial institutions, will give clients the functionality to invite friends and family to sign up to the Bank – and for both clients and friends to get rewarded in the form of Discovery Miles, creating an eco-system of shared-value. “Internationally, some of the most successful technology-driven businesses, such as Airbnb and Uber, have reached unprecedented scale from “digital word-of-mouth” referrals and, at Discovery, we’ve always believed…

MTN South Africa today announced a $2 million (R28 million) partnership with the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, to expand MTN’s Mobile Money (MoMo) business. The partnership will target the unbanked and underbanked population by establishing a strong network of MoMo agents in the country. The partnership will also see a strong job employment drive and will see IFC and MTN South Africa seek to recruit 10 000 Mobile Money Agents in 2021 to increase access to affordable financial services in underserved communities. MTN will identify, recruit, enrol, train, and supervise the new MoMo…

The Blockchain Research Institute (BRI), the world’s largest independent blockchain think-tank, is launching a new wave of global expansion with the announcement of BRI Africa, BRI Middle East, and BRI Korea. Blockchain Research Institute Africa will be launched in partnership with Standard Bank Group, while BRI Middle East will be launched in partnership with Konnect & Co., and BRI Korea will be launched in partnership with BOSAGORA Foundation. “This global expansion of the Blockchain Research Institute is another step towards realizing the potential of blockchain for the global digital economy,” said Don Tapscott, Co-founder and Executive Chairman of the BRI.…

4Sight joined an elite group of only a handful of South African systems integrators certified in the Windows Server and SQL Server Migration to Microsoft Azure Advanced Specialization. Aldo van Tonder, Digital Officer, 4Sight and head of its Modern Digital Enterprise division, says the accreditation is not just strategically important given the key role that the cloud is playing in the massive digital transformation underway across the public and private sectors. It also validates the extensive experience we bring to our partners and customers, he says. “CxOs are seeing some form of migration to cloud services as a lynchpin of…

Google Cloud has announced the general availability of Vertex AI, a managed machine learning (ML) platform that allows companies to accelerate the deployment and maintenance of artificial intelligence (AI) models. Vertex AI requires nearly 80% fewer lines of code to train a model versus competitive platforms, enabling data scientists and ML engineers across all levels of expertise the ability to implement Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) to efficiently build and manage ML projects throughout the entire development lifecycle. “We had two guiding lights while building Vertex AI: get data scientists and engineers out of the orchestration weeds, and create a industry-wide…

EXPLORE Insights is gearing to offer SME  financial services companies in South Africa a crucial data analytics service aimed at delivering real-time insights within 24 hours. “Building an internal analytics capability is expensive and complex.  Our aim is to quickly, seamlessly and affordably provide SMEs with valuable business insights enabling better business decision making and improving market competitiveness. We can provide an analytics platform that can deliver real-time insights for the business within 24 hours,” says Dewald Botha, head of EXPLORE Insights. EXPLORE Insights is a division of The EXPLORE group, which founded the Explore Data Science Academy (EDSA), South…

More than 1.4 million Standard Bank customers have downloaded add-ons from the mobile banking app since the Add-on Store launch in February. The Add-On Store gives customers the ability to download a host of banking products and services, in the form of widgets, called add-ons, within the app. The Add-on Store works in a similar way to the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, allowing a user to browse and decide if they want to add an add-on onto their banking app. It also provides customers with detailed descriptions of each add-on, plus the ability to rate and review, re-order…

LAWtrust, a global Certificate Authority (CA) and Africa’s leading provider of identity and Digital Trust Services, today announced it has joined the Cloud Signature Consortium. LAWtrust will work closely with the Cloud Signature Consortium to help drive the development of a common technical specification that will assist with the global adoption of digital signature signing standards. The Cloud Signature Consortium, which was founded by Adobe in 2016, is a group of industry and academic organizations committed to building a new standard for cloud-based digital signatures that will support web and mobile applications and comply with the most demanding electronic signature…

Pay@ – South African payment aggregator and provider of secure payment solutions – will be expanding into several African countries and providing consumers and businesses alike with a variety of payment methods. With the African Continental Free Trade Agreement set to generate combined consumer and business spending of $6.7 trillion by 2030,  the continent requires payment platforms to cater for this growth. The company’s CEO, Andrew Hardie says that Pay@ has deployed operations into Namibia, Botswana and Lesotho over the past few years but will now be adding Zambia, Mozambique and Angola to this list, with additional African countries in…