Microsoft, WOCCU support SACCOs with digital solutions to improve SME lending in Kenya

Microsoft, WOCCU support SACCOs with digital solutions to improve SME lending in Kenya

Microsoft is working with the World Council of Credit Unions (WOCCU) to support Savings and Credit Cooperatives Societies (SACCOs) with digital finance solutions to improve and increase credit union lending to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Kenya.

The company held a two-day ideation workshop with 16 SACCOs in Mombasa seeking to understand the digital transformation challenges faced by the lending sector. With a strategic partnership execution program drawn to address the concerns raised during the event.

SACCOs SME lending Kenya

Microsoft says digital transformation will firstly build trust among members and improve loan repayments. Secondly, It will enable informed decision making on members or clients. Thirdly, the transformation will enable better credit scoring letting SACCOs manage risks and improve their bottom line.

Microsoft announced an MoU with WOCCU last year to help accelerate digital transformation within the savings and credit sector. Where both parties will work to establish a framework for the digital transformation of SACCOs in Kenya. Microsoft will leverage programs to close the skills gap and develop a training curriculum to accelerate the adoption. It will also identify local partners to support the development of solutions and business strategies within the sector. Whilst WOCCU will deploy its TIFI lending methodology and SME Finance Toolkit.

COVID-19 has accelerated the need for SACCOs to evolve and embrace digital channels. Empowering them to embark on this journey is not only critical to their sustainability but also the key to unlocking further growth potential within the region,” said Megan O’Donnell, WOCCU Vice President of Financial Inclusion. 

Both organizations will develop a proof of concept that can be tested and deployed once they meet sector demands.

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Standard Bank partners with Microsoft to establish the African Digital Foundry

Standard Bank partners with Microsoft to establish the African Digital Foundry

Standard Bank and Microsoft announce a strategic partnership to accelerate the digital transformation of Africa’s largest financial institution and further drive the continent’s growth. The Bank’s growing investment in the Microsoft Cloud will enable the innovation, efficiencies, and resilience required to respond to market dynamics and customer needs.

This partnership builds on the 30-year relationship between the two companies and involves migrating workloads, applications, and platforms to Microsoft Azure to drive organisational efficiencies, as well as workforce collaboration with Azure, PowerApps, Workplace Analytics and Microsoft Teams.

“Investing in the cloud will allow Standard Bank to achieve its strategy to transform from a traditional financial services company into a digital platform company, providing financial services, plus ancillary and associated services. We have adopted a cloud-first strategy, underpinned by end-to-end security and data-driven insights that will enable transformation with tangible results,” says Standard Bank Group Chief Executive, Sim Tshabalala.

“Standard Bank’s cloud-first strategy underlines the growing momentum in financial services to deliver differentiated experiences that today’s customers expect,” said Judson Althoff, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Worldwide Commercial Business. “As a long-standing technology partner, we are pleased to collaborate with Standard Bank in realizing this strategy and in becoming Africa’s future-first financial services firm through digital skilling-focused initiatives that will expand economic opportunity for young people across Africa.”

As part of the partnership, the companies will also:

  • Establish the African Digital Foundry (The Foundry), a strategic alliance, for Standard Bank and Microsoft to collaborate to co-create unique solutions through new technology to meet the financial needs of Africa’s consumers. Through the Foundry, the companies aspire to reach 100 million customers in Africa over the next five years.
  • Bring together their resources and know-how to provide youth with the relevant digital skills needed to secure future-ready jobs and equip Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) with digital skills and capabilities so that they can take advantage of the growing shift to digital technologies.

The African Digital Foundry (The Foundry)

Standard Bank and Microsoft, through the Foundry, will co-create and execute joint go-to-market digital services related to trade, payment, and risk-based (lending and insurance) solutions.  They will also develop ecosystems enabling digital trading to facilitate Africa’s growth.

“The Foundry is a digital initiative established in Africa, for Africans, to address the unique challenges the continent faces with customised innovations, services and solutions,” says Tshabalala. “The partnership will further enhance and create ongoing collaboration between our firms around co-engineering solutions for African consumers’ unique needs.”

Skills and Small Medium Enterprise (SME) Development

Harnessing the power and reach of both organisations, the partnership will also drive digital skills development, boost youth employment, and accelerate the growth of SMEs on the African continent.

Both organisations believe that digital transformation represents an opportunity for the continent to leap ahead, taking a leading role in enabling economic and societal growth in Africa.

Microsoft and Standard Bank will leverage their combined research, industry, partner and start-up programmes to impact the continent – where similar opportunities and challenges exist – using technology such as mixed reality and artificial intelligence.

“Continuing to build on the partnership is part of the ongoing journey that Standard Bank and Microsoft are on to invest in digital transformation as the enabler of meaningful and tangible innovation. Our journey is underpinned by collaborative efforts to develop, scale and roll-out digital solutions that will deliver personalised services to 100 million Africans and by meeting their unique and evolving needs and demands,” says Tshabalala.

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Coca-Cola is unifying operations, streamlining pricing with Microsoft tools

Coca-Cola is unifying operations, streamlining pricing with Microsoft tools

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA) is collaborating with pricing and rebate management experts Flintfox, and Microsoft to modernise how it uses technology. This is part of an ongoing digital transformation programme at its bottling plants. The collaboration will help the bottling giant retire legacy solutions, to better manage pricing and overcome existing challenges at all stages of the supply chain.

The collaboration between Microsoft and Flintfox helps CCBA to accelerate its digital transformation journey, via seamless digital systems that enable the entire business to operate as one.

Flintfox’s Trade Revenue Management and RMx pricing extended the capabilities of our Finance and Operations solutions. Enabling CCBA’s digital transformation“, notes Gavin Holme, consulting services director at Microsoft South Africa. “With Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and Azure, CCBA will achieve their goal to unify operations and intelligently adjust processes in real-time. He adds.”

Trade Revenue Management and the RMx pricing engine provide CCBA with the ability to manage advanced pricing and promotions, reduce operating costs and monitor margins. By extending the capability of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and integrating with existing e-commerce and sales force automation platforms, Flintfox will enable real-time hyper-speed pricing and help deliver accurate pricing across the supply chain.

It’s an exciting time to be working with CCBA, as they bring their digital transformation vision to life via Microsoft Dynamics 365 and set out on a path of accelerated growth“, says Flintfox EMEA Director Mark Conway. He adds,  “Our intelligent solutions will reduce operating costs, create productivity gains and future-proof operations. What’s more, we will provide real-time pricing accuracy across CCBA’s channels and deliver significant, measurable ROI to the business.”

Coca-Cola Beverages Africa Chief Information Officer Joshua Motsuenyane notes: “Because CCBA was born out of a merger of different companies, there are a number of infrastructure redundancies, supply duplications, and lines of accountability that were blurred. We needed to perfect the overall business’ ability to operate as one and improve pricing transparency and visibility. Flintfox and Microsoft helped us strategize how to better manage advanced pricing, promotion management, and complex supply chain pricing, as well as provide a roadmap for the future. This integration with Flintfox and Microsoft modernizes the way we use technology across our entire IT landscape and allows us to completely retire legacy systems“.

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CSPs must transform to provide customers with a more seamless digital experience

CSPs must transform to provide customers with a more seamless digital experience

csps azure africa digital transformation

Pikie Monaheng, CEO of Amdocs South Africa says the covid-19 global pandemic is accelerating the need for digitization. He is therefore asking communications service providers (CSPs) to step up as African customers demand a more seamless digital customer experience.

It’s no secret that CSPs need to transform their businesses to compete in the continent’s highly competitive communications landscape and deliver the experiences that customers are demanding today. However, digital transformation is a journey, which takes time. And there are many tasks to undertake on the way.

So, how do CSPs go about achieving true digital transformation? What are the main challenges they must address?

IT modernisation is a key enabler of any digital transformation and adoption of cloud technologies is central to that. In addition to cost savings, the cloud provides the ability to swiftly evolve, react to market dynamics and launch new offerings. It enables elasticity on demand, creating an always-on environment where the flexibility to do things as a service is much greater and the organisation is not confined to own-premise computing power and IT.

CSPs will necessarily adopt a hybrid approach to cloud adoption with some systems remaining on-premise and others migrating to private cloud, public cloud and even multiple public clouds (like AWS, Azure and GCP) to benefit from the latest technologies and cost efficiencies. This complex IT environment creates challenges around managing the hybrid co-existence of the current and the new platforms, which requires careful management.  Moreover, adoption of cloud brings new concerns such as the need for continuous optimisation, financial and economic management, regulatory compliance and data and security management.

Data is key for anticipating customer needs. Savvy CSPs will need to start leveraging data more effectively to make more astute business decisions. Here, AI plays a key role, helping CSPs to quickly create new offerings based on what customers are demanding. Injecting artificial intelligence into everything the organisation does will help it make critical business decisions, but also keep pace with an ever-changing, connectivity-first society.

CSPs will also need to inject intelligence into their own operations. To remain ahead of technology’s rapid evolution, organisations will be compelled to introduce AI-driven operations, while making continuous improvements to their IT environments. This is the only way to ensure flexibility and a fleet-footed response to change.

Ultimately, the success of any digital transformation depends on the people and the processes that execute the transformation. This requires getting employees to buy into digital adoption, embrace new technologies, new processes and new ways of working.

CSPs need to adapt their organisational culture to break down barriers and automate and expedite processes. They must instil a continuous learning and innovation mindset in their employees. Steps such as these will allow CSPs to be more agile and ensure their employees have the inherent ability to quickly adapt to the next big disruption.

With the focus on reskilling and repurposing, as well as the automation of manual tasks, employees will no longer have to do repetitive or onerous tasks. Rather, they will be freed up to concentrate more on business innovation and customer service.

One successful digital transformation story is that of a South East Asian media conglomerate, which recently underwent a digital transformation programme and migrated its business support systems (BSS) to cloud. The aim was to improve the user experience and increase self-service adoption, personalise recommendations and improve usability.

In 14 months – and negotiating Covid-19 challenges – the transformation journey resulted in upfront operational and capital expenditure savings, as well as 10% cost optimisation. Also, the business was able to decommission data centres and enable updates to individual apps without impacting its overall digital architecture.

In another instance, Philippines-based telecommunications company, Globe, modernised a fragmented and inefficient call centre to deliver an enhanced digital experience for customers.

To deliver better customer interactions and reduce waiting time, increase call resolution rates and enrich their customers’ digital lifestyles, the company’s legacy system was migrated to the cloud (Amazon Connect) and an Amdocs solution was adopted to convert 31 screens to a single, unified agent desktop. This led to a 40% reduction in operating expenditure (OPEX) and an overall improvement in net promoter score (NPS).

Monaheng says digital transformation journeys may come with some challenges, but the rewards are worth the effort. “CSPs that have already embarked on accelerated journeys to transform their businesses are positioning themselves to deliver digital customer services that leverage new opportunities and technologies and elevate their customers’ satisfaction and happiness rates. And frankly, the operations that don’t ride the transformation wave will be left behind.”

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Covid-19: Free Microsoft tech to keep Kenya courts productive

Covid-19: Free Microsoft tech to keep Kenya courts productive

Kenya courts

Microsoft is giving Kenya courts six months free access to its Office 365 collaboration platform dubbed Teams as social distancing rules take root in the wake of Covid-19.

Open court sessions are suspended to limit exposure to the virus. Kenya courts are therefore relying on technology to continue operations and avoid backlogs.

Chief Justice David Maraga notes the court’s activities involve an extensive exchange of paperwork which risks the spread of the virus.

While it is prudent to upscale court activities it will not be wise to have open court sessions at this time. This doesn’t mean the courts have closed down, court operations have never and will never be closed.
The proceedings can only be conducted remotely through increased use of technology. Except in exceptional circumstances, all pleadings are being filed and served electronically.
All other matters including the delivery of judgements shall be handled through video conferencing or email.
I want to announce Microsoft has donated the application of Microsoft Teams for use for six months free of charge.

David Maraga, Chief Justice Kenya

Digital transformation is therefore inevitable in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

software has a huge role to play

Free tools

Global pandemic Covid-19 has changed the way most people work. Governments are issuing lockdowns, curfews, cessation of movements and restricting the number of individuals at gatherings to curb the spread of the deadly virus. This has compelled businesses and organizations including courts to rethink their work model.

Technology companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Zoom and Google have stepped in to help companies wade uncertain times as they seek to stay afloat. Most of the tech firms are offering video conferencing, remote and team collaboration tools free of charge during this period. Microsoft announced it is making Teams – which comes bundled in Office 365 – free for everyone.

“During this extraordinary time, it is clear that software, has a huge role to play across every industry and around the world“, notes Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella. Speaking about the company’s unique role as a platform and tools provider during this global pandemic. 

In trying to meet global demand, Microsoft recently introduced new features in Teams. These include offline connectivity, low-bandwidth connection, real-time noise suppression, etc..

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