Absa Bank has partnered with SAP, a technology company, to implement a core finance transformation. The bank’s Kenyan subsidiary has begun a multi-country digitization journey, becoming the first country to go live with SAP S/4 HANA.
The Kenyan implementation of S/4 HANA was launched on Amazon Web Service Hyperscaler, an African first for SAP and a Tier 1 bank in the African banking industry.
Commenting on this technology, Ebrahim Samodien of CIO Functions Technology commented, “Using best of breed technology and cloud, we are transforming our Finance business with highly integrated systems, automation and consolidation of our financial data and reporting.”
SAP had previously been chosen to assist in simplifying Absa Banks’s internal finance and reporting processes. The implementation of SAP S/4 HANA is a step towards Absa’s vision to consolidate and report off a single instance General Ledger.
SAP S/4 HANA will help Absa to intelligently automate manual processes, simplify their data models, guide decision making process through embedded analytics and machine learning. The technology will also improve the bank’s IT TCO by enabling legacy system decommissioning and moving compute resources into the cloud.
The SAP services teams in collaboration with Absa’s IT team commenced the S/4 HANA project as part of the Owari program in May 2020. The program was implemented using a combination of on-site and remote delivery consisting of SAP colleagues from EMEA South and, SDC India and Europe.
On her part, Cathy Smith, MD SAP Africa stated, “We are delighted to have joined forces with Absa on their finance transformation. Absa are innovating and leveraging further insights into their core operational processes. This project also highlights the quick time to value realization our customers are achieving through S/4HANA implementations and the associated benefit of the embedded technology capabilities.”