Mobile-Driven AI Finance For Africa

The Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit (HiFS) Sub-Saharan Africa 2025 has paved a new path for the digital transformation of Africa’s financial services industries (FSI). Huawei shared how its “Mobile First, Resilience Empowers AI-infused Finance” strategies would strengthen service resilience and promote digital innovation for the FSIs on the continent.

In his opening address titled “In Africa, for Africa, Technology Inclusion Booming Financial Inclusion”, Victor Guo, President of Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Enterprise Business, said that greater technology integration is driving financial inclusion on the continent. He observed that increased economic activity and smartphone adoption have enhanced banking services in Africa. Through ICT solutions, cloud/data platforms and AI solutions, Huawei enhances the growth of the financial services sector.

“We have worked across sectors to accelerate rapid development of inclusive finance and dramatically decrease the rate of unbanked people in Sub-Saharan Africa,” he noted. “In the telecommunications sector, for example, we have worked with the likes of Safaricom in Kenya and helped them launch M-PESA.” This mobile money innovation helps over 34 million East Africans pay for goods and services as well as access credit and savings through their phones.

“Now we are working with one of the top banks in Africa to achieve 100 million users in the next five years by building fully digital ecosystems,” said Guo.

Enabling resilient, mobile-first financial services

As institutions digitise, new challenges emerge. Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei Digital Finance Business Unit, in his keynote speech titled “Mobile First, Resilience Empowers AI-infused Finance”, spoke about how the company is realigning its strategy to support financial service resilience in Africa. “Reliability is still a big issue, and this is not just for the banks in emerging countries. Even in Singapore or in Europe, a lot of outages still happen, and that’s because the banking industry has a huge technology burden.” For Huawei, solutions come down to rethinking how it innovates for mobile-first strategies.

In addition to its technology and customer expertise, Huawei is now introducing its R-A-A-S (Reliability, Availability, Autonomy, and Security) framework to accelerate financial Institutions’ digital and intelligent transformation as they grapple with the challenges of the intelligent era.

Reliability will remain key to preventing data loss through multi-copy storage and real-time synchronisation. Availability will also be a focus to minimise service interruptions with cell-based databases and multi-centre cloud services, thus ensuring 99.999% system availability. Next, autonomy will be promoted so systems can operate independently through AI, which enables speedy fault identification and corrections. Lastly, security will not be left behind; Huawei will deploy AI-powered in-depth defence systems that rapidly identify and block cyberattacks.

Cao observed that mobile-first strategies will also be central to digital transformation. By 2030, about 81% of people in Sub-Saharan Africa are expected to own smartphones, meaning customers will increasingly expect financial providers to offer smooth, mobile-ready experiences.

A fresh approach to mobile-first banking is essential for success in the intelligent era. To achieve this, a strategic shift towards online business is needed to cultivate broader connections. By fostering more connections, companies can become more data-centric, which in turn allows them to develop more advanced models for financial institutions. These models empower FSIs to become more intelligent, ultimately facilitating the creation of a thriving digital ecosystem.

Ian Ravenscroft, Vice President of Mobile Money at Huawei, presented the topic “Mobile First: Online Life Enabled by Smart, Empowered Super Apps”. He observed that mobile growth and digital ecosystems will become key pillars for FSIs to succeed in their digital transformation journeys. He predicts that digital financial services will develop to a point where they are also offered through digital supermarkets, where different providers can reach customers with a range of services in what he called super apps.

This means that in future, financial platforms will be integrating other apps that consumers regularly access in order to achieve greater scale. At the core of super app’s success is “the ability to take digital content from other companies, repurpose it and put it inside an FSI’s app, without needing their own I.T. department”, said Ravenscroft. Huawei has many success stories from around the world that exemplify this trend. In Myanmar, for example, it has supported KBZ Bank to develop 15 million users and 300,000 merchants in the past years.

KBZ’s innovation is succeeding because “they have empowered other businesses in Myanmar to put their business and content online, through the KBZ Super App.”

Leap to Cloud to Accelerate Intelligence of FSIs

Roc Bai, Vice President of Huawei Cloud Sub-Saharan Africa, stressed the pivotal role that resilient cloud infrastructure and services play in building a strong digital ecosystem. Huawei has ensured that African enterprises are well catered for with three availability zones in South Africa and a full cloud stack launched in 2024, which provides more than 100 cloud services with zero major outages in the past year.

“AI is changing everything. Every company regards AI as part of their core strategy,” says Bai. “More companies are investing in computing power, data and innovative models so they can stay in the lead.”

Bai highlighted that Huawei database infrastructure like DWS and Datalake can solve industry challenges related to processing high amounts of data and delivering immediate customer service. He concluded by stressing that “having innovative models means increasing the speed of business transformation and the growth of the financial services as a whole.”

The summit concluded with a thought-provoking panel discussion led by award-winning futurist and author Brett King. Huawei’s Roc Bai and other esteemed industry guests shared insights on the challenges facing financial services in Africa, as well as approaches that can lead to lasting solutions and faster growing industries.

The Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit Sub-Saharan Africa 2025 brought together more than 150 attendees, including key industry opinion leaders as well as executives from major banks and other stakeholders in the financial service industry.