International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), a United States tech giant, says it is engaging some banks in Ghana to introduce two of its products, IBM Cloud for Financial Services and IBM Cloud Satellite to enhance their operations and service delivery.
“We are currently engaged with clients, assessing their workloads, which are best suited to benefit from the unique capabilities provided by IBM Cloud for Financial Services and IBM Cloud Satellite. We’re leveraging the expertise of IBM from across the continent and globe as well as experiences from working with major global clients to deliver the best for banking clients in Ghana”, the General Manager of IBM West Africa , Dipo Faulkner, told the Ghanaian Times in an interview.
The news of the Corporation’s engagement with banks in Ghana comes on the back of its recent deal with the six banks on the continent; Ecobank, Nedbank, United Bank of Africa, Co-operative Bank of Kenya, Attijariwafa Bank and Banco Mais, to enable the banks stockpile their information with some of it kept internally in private cloud and other data stored in public clouds.
Mr Faulkner said the IBM Cloud for Financial Services would enable banks to deploy on cloud to enable innovation and deliver new, more personalised customer experiences, while managing stringent industry regulations for sensitive data and critical workloads.
He said the products had built-in regulatory and compliance controls; gives clients access to IBM’s industry security technology and confidential computing capabilities which allows banks to maintain full privacy and authority over their workload despite not having authority over the infrastructure.
Asked what makes IBM Cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies unique, he said they help banks scale their data needs in real-time, which avoids the expensive proposition of maintaining a lot of unused digital capacity as well as enable banks to move digital resources where they are needed quickly, allowing them to respond to shifting customer demands.
“Our hybrid cloud solutions speed up innovation because it’s not limited to a specific geographical location or even organisation. Innovation can be used to create seamless, personalised digital customer experiences to meet growing customer demands”, he said.
Mr Faulkner said AI and cloud technology was not strange in the banking sector because increasingly, financial institutions were embedding them into their processes in the form of services including customer identification and authentication, chatbots and voice assistants, deepening customer relationships.
“These banks are harnessing the power of modern technology to give customers the financial services they want, where and when they need them and IBM is continuing our work to deliver secure, scalable solutions addressing the specific needs of the financial services industry in Ghana”, he said.
As industries across Africa turn to hybrid cloud and AI technologies, Mr Faulkner said, IBM stood ready to help the industry create meaningful experiences, powered by data-driven insights; meet regulatory and compliance frameworks
He said it would also ensure maximum security of data at every level and build cloud-ready, strong and secure platform businesses underpinned by the right technology that are ready for foreseen and unforeseen disruptions.
BY JONATHAN DONKOR
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