Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit charts mobile-first, AI-driven future for Africa

Industry leaders and ICT innovators recently gathered at the 2025 Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit Sub-Saharan Africa to discuss the future of Africa’s financial services sector and address the challenges of implementing innovative solutions.

The summit’s agenda focused on fostering a progressive dialogue to shape the future of technology and finance in the region.

Victor Guo, president of Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Enterprise Business, emphasised the transformative impact of technology integration on financial inclusion across the continent. He highlighted the rapid evolution of financial services in Africa, driven by increased economic activity and widespread smartphone adoption — all fitting themes for an address titled, “In Africa, for Africa, Technology Inclusion Booming Financial Inclusion”.

Leveraging its ICT proficiency in 5G, cloud computing, and large language models (LLM), Huawei is committed to powering the growth of the financial services sector. The scale of its expertise can be seen over its 27-year track record in Africa, where it has supported telcos, fintechs and banks to drastically enhance financial inclusion. “Our cross-sector collaborations are instrumental in accelerating the growth of inclusive finance and significantly reducing the proportion of unbanked individuals in Sub-Saharan Africa,” said Guo.

Huawei’s impactful work on the continent includes partnering with telecommunication leaders like Safaricom in Kenya to launch M-Pesa, a mobile money transfer service that now boasts over 34-million customers in East Africa. In the fintech sector, Huawei has partnered with innovators like Opay in Nigeria, contributing to the financial services platform’s impressive reach of 35-million users within the past five years. “Now, we are working with a leading African bank to achieve 100-million users over the next five years through the development of fully digital ecosystems.”

Other speakers at the summit showcased how Huawei’s digital platforms strengthen banking resilience, reduce service outages and guide industry partners on trends that will inform the future of Africa’s financial services industry. They also shared insights on the growing importance of cloud services and artificial intelligence (AI) for digital innovation.

The future of Africa’s financial services industry

Award-winning futurist and author Brett King spoke about the future possibilities that AI agents and AI-based ecosystems could unlock for the sector.

Focusing on Bank 5.0 and Agentic Banking, King stressed that sectors like financial services would need to integrate AI into their processes and problem sets to reap the rewards of cutting-edge AI advancements.

King foresees the impact of AI being at the centre of unlocking the Bank 5.0 era, which will be defined by smart contracts and AI-based marketplaces. He identified the development of stable quantum computing platforms as a development that would redefine banking. 

“In the next five years, we expect to see the first stable quantum computing platforms. This is important because once this has been achieved, our current security infrastructure, which is RSA-based encryption, will be undermined by quantum computing,” King said.

He emphasised that only financial institutions that were taking advantage of cloud services like Huawei Cloud, with post-quantum encryption technologies, would be protected.

King said banks and other financial institutions would need to have technical and cultural agility to survive in the world of banking 5.0, where AI systems enabled consumer interactions everywhere.

Enabling resilient, mobile-first financial services

Huawei remains responsive to the opportunities available in the Bank 5.0 era and is committed to helping its partners in Africa’s financial services industry realise this generational progress.

As Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei’s Digital Finance Business Unit, said, “We have already seen how digital payments and AI are changing the sector. AI is changing how we use our phones, and we see a future where everyone will have an agent and this will cause a behavioural change that affects the whole industry.”

These changes mean the sector will need to reconsider how it structures customer journeys.

In addition to its technology and customer expertise, Huawei is now introducing its AI-powered 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. This approach will help financial institutions address current challenges, like reducing service outages while keeping systems agile.

The R-A-A-S framework forms the foundation of how Huawei solves challenges for its financial sector customers. It’s based on four pillars:

1. Reliability: This ensures zero data loss through multi-copy storage, real-time synchronisation, and cross-domain co-ordination of storage, computing, and network.
   
   
2. Availability: This pillar minimises service interruptions with cell-based databases, microservice clusters, and multi-centre multi-active cloud services, ensuring 99.999% system availability.
   
   
3. Autonomy: By having zero human errors, one-minute fault identification, five-minute fault location, and 10-minute fault rectification, systems can work independently. In increasingly complex IT environments, Huawei’s digital twin and AI technologies enable intelligent simulation, observation, location, and rectification, forming an AIOps system across multiple vendors and domains, including cloud, network, and security.
   
   
4. Security: This enables an in-depth defence system powered by AI through terminal-edge-cloud collaboration, cloud-storage-network collaboration, and unified security policy management. This system can rapidly identify and block cyberattacks within seconds to ensure data security.

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 demand smooth mobile experiences from their banks.

Huawei believes that the intelligent era necessitates a fresh approach to mobile-first banking. This strategy centres on bringing more businesses online to cultivate broader connections. To achieve this, Huawei works with its customers to redesign the customer journey and eliminate failure points within business processes.

By fostering increased connections, Huawei facilitates a shift towards data-centric business models, which in turn enables the development of more advanced models for financial companies. These advanced models empower financial institutions to enhance their AI use and streamline the creation of thriving digital ecosystems.

Cloud computing accelerates an intelligent financial sector

Roc Bai, vice president of Huawei Cloud Sub-Saharan Africa, emphasised that robust cloud infrastructure and services were essential for a strong digital ecosystem.

Huawei’s commitment to African enterprises is evident in its three availability zones in SA and a comprehensive cloud stack launched in 2024, which offers over 100 cloud services and has maintained a flawless record with no major outages in the past year. This reliable and scalable cloud infrastructure is essential to support the AI and data-driven solutions that are becoming central to the financial sector.

Bai said, “AI is transforming everything. Every company considers AI as a core component of their strategy.” He highlighted that businesses were increasing their investment in computing power, data, and innovative models to maintain a competitive edge.

Huawei’s database infrastructure, including DWS and Data Lake, addresses industry challenges related to high-volume data processing and real-time customer service, aligning with the demands of the intelligent era. Bai concluded that “innovative models accelerate business transformation and drive growth across the financial services sector”, demonstrating Huawei’s commitment to supporting its clients through this strategic shift.

Cloud will be essential to the future of the financial services industry, says Ian Ravenscroft, vice president of Mobile Money at Huawei. He presented his views on the future of mobile money in a speech titled “Mobile First: Online Life Enabled by Smart, Empowered Super Apps”.

Huawei foresees mobile growth and digital ecosystems becoming key pillars for success in the financial sector. Financial institutions will be drivers of innovations like super apps, where they become an online marketplace that hosts a range of different businesses that consumers access through a single app.

At the core of super apps’ success was “the ability to take digital content from other companies, repurpose it and put it inside a [financial institution’s] app, without needing their own IT department”, said Ravenscroft. He pointed out that examples of this trend already existed, and that Huawei had been involved in supporting many successful use cases around the world. 

Crafting industry success in the intelligent era

The Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit 2025 not only showcased Huawei’s technological prowess and commitment to Africa’s financial sector, but also fostered a vital exchange of ideas and experiences.

The engaging panel discussion, featuring insights from key players like Temenos, a world leader in banking software, and Angola’s Banco BAI, one of the major banks in Africa, underscored the practical benefits of partnering with Huawei for digital transformation. These real-world examples highlight how Huawei’s solutions are actively addressing challenges and driving innovation across the continent.

Huawei stands as a pivotal force in shaping the future of the African financial services industry. With its robust infrastructure, cutting-edge AI solutions, and deep understanding of the region’s unique needs, Huawei is not just a technology provider but a strategic partner, empowering financial institutions to thrive in the intelligent era and deliver meaningful impact to their customers.

This article was sponsored by Huawei Enterprise.