Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Intelligent Finance Summit 2026: Resilience First, Intelligence Next
Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei Digital Finance BU
On May 21, Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Intelligent Finance Summit 2026, themed ” Resilience First, Intelligence Next ” was held at Huawei’s Lianqiu Lake R&D Center in Shanghai.
During the summit, the theme ” Resilience First, Intelligence Next ” became a consensus among African financial industry clients and their peers regarding the future of the industry.
Faced with the digital divide, system vulnerabilities, and technological anxiety, Huawei proposed a digital and intelligent evolution path tailored to the African financial industry.
This path progresses from cloudification and mobility to resilience, ultimately advancing toward intelligence.
Embrace Artificial Intelligence, and Together Build a New Future for African Finance
This year’s summit gathered over 100 senior executives, industry experts, and technology leaders from financial institutions in eight Sub-Saharan African countries.
Additionally, more than 20 industry partners participated. The summit focused on three major directions: cloudification, mobility, and resilience.
The summit facilitated strategic dialogue, helping financial institutions within the region to address the challenges of transformation and to unlock new opportunities for sustainable growth.
Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei Digital Finance BU, delivered a speech titled “Embrace AI and Build a New Financial Future in Africa”.
He pointed out that in the next five to ten years, artificial intelligence will become the primary driver of the financial industry’s development. Currently, CEOs and CIOs in the global financial industry are urgently seeking practical and feasible AI solutions.
Jason Cao reviewed the digital transformation journey of China’s financial industry over the past 10 to 15 years, during which China has achieved a cashless society through continuous efforts, profoundly transforming the financial landscape.
He emphasized that China’s experience cannot be simply replicated and needs to be adapted to local realities for each financial institutions of each country.
By leveraging cutting-edge technology and global practices, collaborating with local African partners, Huawei is willing to jointly support the digital and intelligent transformation of African countries and help to build a more resilient and dynamic future of finance industries.
Victor Guo, President of Sub-Saharan Africa Enterprise Business, in his keynote speech, pointed out that Huawei adheres to the concept of “In Africa, for Africa”, and has been working in Africa for 28 years, serving 83% of the population in 27 countries and cooperating with 85% of the head banks.
Huawei is willing to work with African banks to move from IT to digital transformation to AI innovation and jointly move into a new era of smart finance.
To address the challenges of financial inclusiveness, cloud and application modernization, and system resilience, Huawei has proposed a clear path: Build the Fintech core and DATA+AI platform, and use super apps to integrate e-wallets, payment, micro-loan, and risk control, helping banks quickly win customers.
In terms of cloud transformation, Huawei offers a combination of four types of clouds: public cloud, private cloud, dedicated cloud, and edge cloud.
This combination meets data compliance requirements and has been successfully implemented in leading banks in South Africa. Huawei’s ” Two-Site Three-DC” solution achieves a recovery point objective (RPO) of 0 for core services, and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 2 minutes. Faults are detected within 1 minute, diagnosed within 3 minutes, and recovered within 5 minutes.
Six layers of anti-ransomware protection ensure security, helping customers transform their resilient data centers from ” nice-to-have” to ” must-have”.
Financial Clients Share Their Digital Transformation Practices
As digital transformation reaches deeper into the waters of the deep end, cloudification is no longer a simple resource replacement. Instead, it has become the core engine driving business reshaping and organizational transformation.
The leap from traditional architectures to cloud-native signifies the comprehensive release of agility, elasticity, and innovation. From multi-active architectures to deep AI integration, from cloud-native to data-ready, the world’s leading banks are reshaping their technical foundations with a “resilience-first” approach, making high-resilience infrastructure a key engine driving growth and trust.
Tsebeletso Mashau, the Africa Regions CIO and Group Deputy CIO Retail of Standard Bank in South Africa, shared the digital transformation practices of Standard Bank. She stated, As digital journeys evolve driven by client expectations, competitive landscape and regulatory pressures.
Cloudification has become the core engine driving business and organizational transformation. The leap from traditional architectures to cloud-native signifies the comprehensive release of agility, elasticity, and innovation.
From multi-active architectures to deep AI integration, from cloud-native to data-ready, the world’s leading banks are reshaping their technical foundations with a “resilience-first” approach, making high-resilience infrastructure a key engine driving growth and trust.
Tsebeletso Mashau underscored that digitalization is fundamentally about using technology to accelerate the pace and responsiveness of financial services by leveraging platforms, data, and automation to deliver faster, smarter, and more adaptive customer experiences.
The intent is to build a seamless financial ecosystem, making it accessible to customers, empowering employees efficiently, and deeply integrating with partners. Furthermore, to provide agile and solid underlying support for the software engineering team, thereby enabling the rapid delivery of customer value.
Standard Bank Group is deepening its strategic cooperation with Huawei across the African continent, focusing on Cloud, AI, data, storage and network innovations. The aim is to create high-performance, highly resilient, and customer-centric next-generation banking solutions.
At the technical architecture level, the bank is fully committed to simplifying the technological landscape. By unifying applications, infrastructure, and governance standards, the bank is building a future-oriented cloud-native architecture.
This ensures exceptional system performance in terms of elasticity, security, and cost-effectiveness. The strong cloud native foundation is key to drive market leadership and sustainable growth across Africa.
Bruce Mwile emphasized, the experience of CRDB is clear: resilience is not an IT objective; it is a business and trust imperative.
Only resilient institutions can scale intelligence, embed AI responsibly, and deliver always on digital banking at continental scale.
At CRDB, this mindset has translated into strong FY2025 performance, industry leading in all metrices-asset quality, deposits, returns and recognized globally with more than 55 awards in 2025, one being the best digital bank.
But more importantly, CRDB Bank has enabled a deeper transformation—where technology is no longer support, but a strategic growth engine.
AI will power the future credit decisions, fraud prevention, customer engagement, and operational efficiency underpinned by strong data foundations and robust AI governance. This is how intelligence scales safely and sustainably.
The partnership with Huawei continues to evolve from infrastructure to true co creation—strengthening resilience, accelerating cloud adoption, and embedding AI at the heart of banking.
The next horizon is clear: a resilient, AI driven, customer centric bank, redefining how financial services are delivered across Africa. The journey continues.
Amon Ngechu, CTO of Digital Business at NCBA Bank in Kenya, said that resilient infrastructure is not only a technology upgrade, but also a cornerstone of business growth.
NCBA will continue to deepen its cooperation with Huawei to provide more reliable, efficient, and intelligent digital financial services for African customers and partners.
With the vision of “unlocking unlimited financial opportunities in Africa”, NCBA Bank builds a Pan-African Digital Platform that Integrate to Bank-centric and MoMo-centric payment schemes and organizes information and capital flows.
In terms of technical architecture, the flexible cloud-native architecture, layered and simplified integration, and separation of OLTP and OLAP significantly reduce O&M costs and enable a unified global platform to support services in multiple countries.
In terms of infrastructure resilience, NCBA upgraded from the active/standby architecture to the high-availability architecture based on Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage.
This has improved system availability and significantly reduced the average latency of core services, effectively reducing the Close of Business (COB) operation time and the number of transaction failures.
Resilience First, Intelligence Next, Huawei is Empowering Africa’s Financial Sector to Achieve a Leapfrog Transformation
Yang Lin, Director of the Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Finance Business Dept., stated in his speech at the Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Gala Dinner held that day: Trust and cooperation are the cornerstones of our relationship.
Huawei has always been committed to supporting our customers in addressing challenges and achieving growth through leading technological solutions.
The deep friendship accumulated over the long term, much like financial resilience, can help each other steadily move forward in a changing environment. Huawei has always worked hand in hand with our customers to build a better future together.
Resilience is no longer an option; it is the lifeline of financial security. Huawei, in partnership with local banks, has elevated the availability of core systems from 98.5% to 99.99%.
This advancement has achieved zero fault tolerance and recovery times measured in minutes. Intelligence, on the other hand, has evolved from a mere enhancement to a primary driver of growth.
Leveraging technology as a fulcrum, Huawei is empowering Sub-Saharan African financial industry clients to foster the organic growth of intelligent finance through resilient architectures, open ecosystems, and localized collaborations.
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