Making sure your resources are highly skilled, is what Microsoft executive, Kunle Awosika, notes will drive innovation in Africa. He made the remark addressing over three hundred delegates. Representing CIOs, CISOs, CTOs, heads of IT, etc. in the banking and financial industry from across East Africa. At the second Africa BFSI Innovation Summit 2020 in Nairobi, Kenya.
Kunle Awosika, Small, Medium and Corporates Lead, Multi-Cluster Countries at Microsoft, shared insights on empowering digital transformation in the financial services industry (FSI). How these organizations can use emerging technologies to create better services and be agile. Microsoft is playing a big part in the evolution of industries he notes. Driving efficiency, automation and performance in financial services.
Skills is a critical part …
One of the challenges we are facing in Africa and within our region is this particular focus area of skills. He shares talking about the skills gap in our market. We see this as we engage our customers and partners. This is the biggest problem to driving innovation today within the banking sector, financial industry and many of the industries that we work in. Skills concern is the right of passage for you to move to the next level. We need to make sure our resources are highly skilled, this is what drives innovation at the end of the day.
Microsoft at Africa BFSI Innovation Summit
https://youtu.be/gxxwuunO7gE
Microsoft has been working through various learning platforms and partnerships to bridge the skills gap in the region.
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18th March 2019; Kuwait City, Kuwait – Microsoft today held the ‘Banking Edition’ of its CISO Executive Series – a series for an elite set of top Chief Information Security Officers for the Kuwait’s Finance sector professionals.
The event, held at the JW Marriott, Kuwait City was specifically tailored for the country’s banking industry to enable its professionals to overcome the rising challenges in the cyber-security landscape and meet the security objectives of their business. The summit comes amid continuous rise of cyber-attacks targeting public and private sector organizations and aims to empower professionals to better protect their company perimeters.
Microsoft experts including Ramon Bosch, Principal, Risk & Compliance, Microsoft EMEA, Volkan Verim, Technical Sales Professional, Security Microsoft Gulf, and Mohammed Zayed, Microsoft 365 & Cyber-Security Solutions Lead for Microsoft Kuwait, delivered insightful presentations and demonstrations around Cyber Security.
The sessions covered a holistic approach and introduction to Microsoft trust principles such as security, privacy, compliance and transparency. The attendees also learned about protecting organizational identities and ensuring data privacy and encryption of information including data classification, compliance policies and practices to meet Financial requirements.
Moreover, the Kuwaiti CISOs were engaged into discussions to shed light on the importance of how the migration of core data and applications can help increase security and bring agility to their operations.
A Microsoft Digital Transformation research on cybersecurity found a troubling threat landscape in the region. Some 63% of respondents said their company lost either productivity or data to a cyber incident in 2018; 46% of these victims were affected more than once; and almost one in 10 victims reported incidents “once a week or more”.
“Today’s CISOs must manage their organization’s risk in the face of rising challenges and the ever-expanding scale and sophistication of today’s cyber threats,” says Mohammed Arif, Regional Director, Modern Workplace & Security, Microsoft Gulf. “Balancing these challenges with business needs to collaborate, innovate, and grow requires an always-on, multifaceted approach to security. With events like our CISO executive series, we aim to create awareness amongst the security professionals of Kuwait and introduce truly intelligent security capabilities that we can offer, in order for them to harness these technologies and better protect their digital estates to achieve more.”
The Microsoft CISO executive event concluded with key takeaways from all perspectives of cyber security and proved to be a strong platform for security professionals from across Kuwait to network with peers and engage with subject matter experts
Microsoft shares that Ecobank Group has improved its business performance using Microsoft’s Power BI solution.
The released statement says; Ecobank, one of the continents leading banking conglomerates has been able to drastically improve its business analytics needs with the help of Microsoft Power BI.
“We were looking for something that was easy to implement and configure as well. Moreover, as we deal with sensitive data, Power BI provides a secured environment which helps protect data integrity.” – Sarah Aryee-Oppan, Head of BI & Big Data Ecobank
Microsoft’s Power BI is a suite of analytic tools that deliver insights. It allows a user to connect data from multiple sources and produce reports that can be accessed on different platforms and devices in real-time.
With it a user can unify data from many sources to create interactive, immersive dashboards and reports that provide actionable insights and drive business results says Microsoft.
On how easy it was getting around Microsoft’s Power BI solution, Sarah said “None of us have attended any formal training. – With most of us being self-taught on Power BI. Various tutorials are also available online – allowing for easier learning.”
Ecobank’s needs in terms of data mining and business analytics was and is prodigious. With operations spread over a whole continent, reporting environments and individual affiliate databases are diverse. Hence the need expressed by Ecobank’s Group CEO, Ade Ayeyemi, for a single dashboard for quicker and easier access to data.
This could be another move in the digital transformation partnership journey between both organizations. As Ecobank CEO Ade Ayeyemi said a year ago, “the main focus is to increase financial inclusion in Africa”.
