As one of Africa’s largest diversified financial services institutions, with a presence spanning 15 countries across the continent, Absa Group boasts a 12-million-strong customer base across personal, business, corporate, investment banking, wealth management and insurance, with a strong focus on digital transformation and innovation.
To further its goal of becoming a digitally powered business delivering a superior experience for customers, the bank has undertaken several transformation initiatives that have seen success and received due recognition at the Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards 2025, hosted by The Digital Banker in Singapore. From delivering secure, seamless and swift payment solutions to ensuring employees’ wellbeing by launching a wellness app, Absa Bank is setting the benchmark for retail banking in Africa.
Making payments safer
Screen scraping involves third-party companies accessing customers’ bank accounts by mimicking online banking portals, often without their informed consent or understanding of the implications. This poses a significant problem in South Africa’s online transaction landscape due to its inherent security risks and lack of transparency, as this practice exposes sensitive financial information to potential fraud and undermines the integrity of the national payment system.
Absa Pay was launched to replace insecure screen scraping with secure, bank-owned API EFT payments, providing customers and merchants with instant, seamless and safe transactions while creating a new digital revenue stream for the bank and advancing Absa’s open banking strategy.
This innovative solution by Absa is one of Africa’s first large-scale, bank-owned open banking EFT API, enabling secure, instant payments while safeguarding customer credentials. Launched within six months, it provides 25-second average payment speeds without requiring customer credential sharing. It features automated merchant onboarding, rapid scalability, secure payment flows, and a new digital revenue stream for Absa.
For delivering a solution that benefits customers with safer transactions and reduced risk of fraud, as well as benefiting merchants with instant payments and reduced checkout abandonments, Absa Bank won the ‘Best New Product Launch of the Year – Payments’ award at the Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards 2025, hosted by The Digital Banker.
Encouraging good financial habits
South Africa struggles with a low national savings rate. Absa Bank noted that a significant portion of the population prioritises short-term needs over long-term financial planning. As part of a financial literacy survey, the bank observed that 46% of adults admitted to “living for today” while 44% were not actively saving.
The struggle to build up savings often arises from a lack of discipline, visibility or motivation, but can also stem from traditional savings tools feeling rigid, uninspiring or disconnected from real-life spending.
To address this issue, Absa Bank launched Savings Coach – a digital savings account easily accessible through the Absa Banking App – designed to make saving automatic, intelligent and engaging, helping users build healthy financial habits effortlessly. A first in the South African banking industry, the proposition is anchored through Behavioural Science, to help make savings effortless, personalised and engaging for customers.
In recognition of its efforts, The Digital Banker presented Absa Bank with the award for ‘Best New Product Launch of the Year – Africa’.
Ensuring employee wellness
In its efforts to become a leading bank not only for its customers, but also for its employees, Absa Bank developed a holistic wellness ecosystem focused on financial, mental and physical wellbeing.
The platform – Absa Wellness – was delivered as a standalone app with single sign-on integration from the Absa Banking App, providing colleagues with engaging content and gamified activities that guide them towards positive behaviours and reward them for their efforts through Absa Rewards.
With Absa Wellness, the bank has created a truly distinctive offering, putting together a carefully considered combination of features that influences colleagues to be healthy, keep themselves engaged, and ultimately make them happier and healthier. For this, Absa Bank took home the award for ‘Best Bank for Employee Experience – Middle East & Africa’.
Leadership recognition
For Absa Bank, another notable achievement at this year’s ceremony was its Chief Digital Officer, Subash Sharma, winning the ‘Digital Banker of the Year – Middle East & Africa’ award.
Over the course of 2024, Sharma achieved several major milestones that helped the bank advance its digital strategy. These include the launch of Absa Pay, which has improved security, reduced fraud risk, and simplified checkout for over 3 million digitally active customers. The bank also rolled out AI-led services such as ChatWallet – a WhatsApp-enabled wallet that allows users to perform transactions through conversational commands – alongside AI upgrades across digital platforms.
Absa, under Sharma’s leadership, also enabled facial biometric verification for PIN resets and account access, reducing branch dependency and improving customer experience.
In terms of sales, Sharma orchestrated a notable growth, with transaction digital sales growth climbing over 85% year-on-year (YOY). He also ensured that the bank’s new digital active user base exceeds target – with transaction new-to-bank strike rate at 67% in 2024 – up from 19% in 2020.
Additionally, Sharma also ensured swift migration to digital from the contact center, with a 30% YOY call centre volume reduction due to the focus on AI driven assistance. Overall, Sharma’s steps ensured that Absa reclaimed the top spot within the mobile app store and through structured business decisions, he achieved the business R47 million in cost optimisation.
