Kenya Bankers Association, Huawei ink deal to promote fintech, financial inclusion
Aderemi Ojekunle is a Businessamlive Reporter.
you can contact hin on aderemi.ojekunle@businessamlive.com with stories and commentary.
A collaborative partnership agreement has been signed between the Kenya Bankers Association (KBA) and tech giants, Huawei Kenya, to strengthen financial inclusion in Kenya’s banking sector by cascading technology and building more capacity for fintech.
Under the new arrangement, the KBA will collaborate with Huawei Kenya to drive initiatives aimed at building capacity industry-wide to bolster financial technology innovation knowledge, as well as engender digital transformation among other ICT centric programmes in the banking sector in Kenya.
The KBA and Huawei Kenya will also set their sights on helping to bring attention to financial inclusion activities in tandem with the KBA’s Strategic Plan, 2020-2023. The plan which was launched last year is geared towards boosting access to tech-aided affordable financial services.
Habil Olaka, the KBA’s chief executive officer, hailed the agreement, noting that it will help in no small way to bolster efficient banking services delivery in Kenya, through programmes that will be held by both organisations for knowledge-sharing.
He said, “This partnership will further focus on research and knowledge-sharing activities, which will supplement the research initiatives that continue to be spearheaded by the association’s Centre for Research Financial on Markets and Policy. In this regard, the collaboration will certainly augment KBA’s and member banks’ knowledge base in engagements with diverse stakeholders from a fact-based perspective.’’
The newly signed partnership is trailing the 2020 edition of the joint Huawei-KBA Online FSI summit scheduled to hold on the 30th of September. The summit is another initiative being held by Huawei and KBA to promote fintech under their partnership agreement.
“Beyond the COVID-19 disruption, we see technology as an invaluable enabler of financial inclusion. I have no doubt that the summit along with the KBA-Huawei collaboration will play a significant role in our collective efforts to entrench technology in our operations and sustain our contribution to the national development agenda,’’ Olaka said.
In his own remarks, Will Feng, Huawei-Kenya’s CEO applauded the KBA-Huawei partnership, commenting that technology will continue to play a strong part in delivering access to financial services in the wake of disruptive events like the current global coronavirus pandemic. He said, ‘’the theme of the upcoming summit is ‘’Building Banking Core Competence through Digital Transformation to Accelerate Inclusive Finance’’.
It is one of the initiatives we are rolling out in Kenya in partnership with the association to ensure we optimally leverage on technology to achieve affordable and accessible financial services in the regional economy.’’