AFIS 2026: African banks must rethink digital transformation, says CR2 CEO

Speaking on the sidelines of the African Financial Industry Summit 2026 in Luanda, Fintan Byrne, chief executive officer of digital banking platform CR2 (now part of Morocco’s HPS Group), argues that African banks are eroding market share, that consumer expectations are shifting toward instant, cross-border services, and that front-end strategy is proving dangerously inadequate to determine the next decade of continental finance. GODFREY GEORGE reports.

For the past decade, commercial banks across Africa have treated the launch of a smartphone application as the definitive proof of digital transformation. Yet, as agile fintechs erode market share and consumer expectations shift toward instant, cross-border services, that front-end strategy is proving dangerously inadequate.

Inside the meeting rooms of the Africa Financial Industry Summit (AFIS) in Luanda, industry veterans are delivering a blunter assessment: rolling out standalone digital applications without overhauling underlying infrastructure is merely papering over legacy cracks.

“Simply launching a mobile application does not solve any problems on its own,” says Fintan Byrne, chief executive officer of CR2. “Innovation for the sake of innovation, or simply introducing another application, does not necessarily deliver value. It requires a comprehensive programme built around the question of what value we are trying to create, what problem we are trying to solve, and what friction we are trying to reduce.”

Byrne, an Irish banking software executive with nearly three decades of experience across the global payments landscape—from retail banking and merchant acquiring to senior roles at card schemes like Mastercard—now leads CR2 under the umbrella of Morocco-headquartered multinational HPS Group.

Between CR2 and HPS, the combined business brings together six decades of payments engineering and serves nearly 60 commercial lenders globally.

In Africa, that footprint includes tier-one institutions such as Absa, Standard Chartered Bank, Standard Bank, and Access Bank, as well as five commercial lenders in Egypt, including Commercial International Bank (CIB), and several institutions across East Africa and Ethiopia.

For Byrne, the dilemma facing African banking chiefs is twofold: legacy lenders must defend their traditional branch and ATM distribution footprints while simultaneously investing in complex digital capabilities to fend off both domestic banking rivals and digital-first fintech insurgents.

The friction test and the platform trap

To separate genuine transformation from digital vanity projects, Byrne subjects every technological deployment to what he calls the “friction test.”

“I always ask my team and the CEOs I engage with to consider what I call the friction test,” Byrne explains.

“Will the solution make something cheaper? Will it save someone money? Will it be easier to use? Will it save time? We need to go through these questions to understand whether the investment we are making will deliver significant benefits.”

The structural mistake many African lenders make, according to Byrne, is purchasing isolated, point-to-point software solutions for individual banking functions.

One vendor is hired for customer onboarding, another for loan origination, a third for mobile interfaces, and a fourth for agency banking. The result is an expensive, fragmented IT estate that slows down innovation and frustrates customers.

CR2’s counter-strategy focuses on platformisation: deploying a unified underlying architecture in which capabilities can be incrementally switched on, without embarking on protracted core-banking overhauls.

“One of the challenges facing banks is that they invest in multiple individual solutions without necessarily connecting them effectively,” Byrne says.

“We encourage banks to invest in a platform and then unlock the capabilities they need from that platform. If a bank wants to develop a specific customer journey for onboarding or loan origination, it should be able to unlock that capability through the platform without having to invest in an entirely new platform or undertake another integration.”

Where banks have executed this shift, the balance-sheet impact has been tangible. In North Africa, Byrne points to Egypt’s CIB, which utilised channel segmentation to route routine transactions away from expensive branch networks to self-service digital and assisted channels, thereby reducing its operational cost-to-income ratio and accelerating customer acquisition.

AI in the build and run phases

While enterprise software forms the backbone of digital banking, the conversation at AFIS 2026 has been dominated by artificial intelligence. Yet, in markets where roughly 85% of economic activity occurs in the informal economy, the practical application of frontier technology is often met with scepticism.

When asked how an AI-first banking posture benefits an informal market woman selling fish in Luanda or Lagos, Byrne splits the technology’s lifecycle into two distinct dimensions: the “build phase” and the “run phase”.

In the build phase, banks must engineer their technical architecture to be machine-readable from day one, using modern application programming interfaces (APIs) and data pipelines that accommodate emerging paradigms such as agentic commerce—in which autonomous software agents make purchasing and financial decisions on behalf of consumers.

The run phase, however, is where immediate commercial value is unlocked, particularly in credit underwriting and fraud prevention.

“How can AI make businesses more efficient in their day-to-day operations?” Byrne asks. “Credit scoring and behavioural scoring are critical areas. You mention the market woman selling fish: how can we better understand her business cash flow and operations? Perhaps we can use that information to provide her with instant credit to support her enterprise. We could also understand the seasonal nature of her trade and take that into account when assessing her financial needs.”

By substituting classical, immovable collateral—such as real estate titles—with transaction analytics and cash-flow data captured through mobile wallets and agency banking networks, lenders can finally underwrite the continent’s vast unbanked and underbanked merchant base.

Crucially, Byrne argues that this same intelligence must be turned outward to defend institutions against escalating financial crime. Rather than simply flagging suspicious transactions post-mortem, machine learning models are being deployed at the infrastructure level to identify behavioural anomalies and predict fraudulent transactions before settlement occurs.

Stablecoins, CBDCs, and orchestration

Beyond credit and fraud, African banking institutions are navigating an evolving monetary landscape marked by central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), stablecoins, and tokenised assets.

Rather than viewing digital currencies as an immediate existential threat to commercial banking, Byrne argues that lenders must treat them as both stores of value and payment mechanisms. More importantly, institutions should not assume that the rise of digital money requires tearing down legacy rails.

To explain the coexistence of new and old payment rails, Byrne uses an automotive parallel.

“When electric cars were introduced, we did not build entirely new roads for them,” Byrne observes. “We continued using the existing roads. However, we needed additional infrastructure, such as charging stations. The same principle applies to digital money. We can leverage existing payment infrastructure, but additional capabilities and investments will be necessary.”

This reality elevates the strategic importance of payment orchestration—the technical plumbing that allows disparate payment rails, card schemes, mobile money wallets, and digital tokens to interoperate smoothly.

As stablecoins gain traction for cross-border trade settlements in currency-starved markets, commercial banks will need robust orchestration platforms to manage on-ramps and off-ramps, ensuring that customers can convert fluidly between sovereign fiat, digital currencies, and bank deposits within a single secure environment.

Trust and security

Throughout the discussions in Luanda, the undercurrent of every technological transition—whether AI, agentic purchasing, or stablecoin rails—remains institutional security.

Without regulatory certainty and ironclad cybersecurity, Byrne cautions that digital initiatives risk catastrophic reputational failure, noting that banking operates under fundamentally different social and regulatory contracts than speculative tech sectors.

“The entire business of banking is built on trust,” Byrne notes. “Therefore, any new evolution or innovation must be introduced with that consideration in mind. Security may not be the most exciting subject, but it is fundamental. Trust is very difficult to build but incredibly easy to lose.”

Pointing to high-profile controversies and enforcement actions that have rocked the broader crypto and exchange sector in recent years, Byrne stresses that traditional banking cannot afford the lax compliance postures often associated with decentralised finance. If a regulated commercial bank were to lose billions of dollars in customer deposits, the systemic contagion and institutional fallout would be existential.

The road ahead

Looking towards the next five years, Byrne envisions a structural consolidation in how African banks engage with technology providers.

The era of bespoke, disconnected software experimentation is winding down, giving way to enterprise partnerships focused on scalability, platform resilience, and hyper-personalisation.

As digital adoption matures, the competitive battlefield for African lenders will centre on treating customers not as broad demographic categories, but as distinct micro-segments.

“We are moving towards what we traditionally describe as a segment of one,” Byrne says. “If a bank has a high-net-worth customer, how does it ensure that the customer receives the right service, experience, and capabilities for their particular needs? The same applies to mass-affluent customers, the mass market, students, and people who are just beginning their financial journeys.”

For Byrne, the message to African banking leadership gathered in Luanda is unmistakable: the institutions that survive the next decade of disruption will not be those that launch the sleekest standalone mobile applications, but those that invest in the unglamorous, heavy-duty platform plumbing required to orchestrate payments, automate intelligence, and safeguard institutional trust.

After two decades of false starts, the International Finance Corporation has selected 15 agritech companies across the continent, backing them with equity while deploying portfolio guarantees to link them directly to the balance sheets of nearly 200 commercial banks.

For the past two decades, the quest to modernise African agriculture through technology has been littered with failed pilots, undercapitalised startups, and commercial lenders unwilling to venture beyond urban corporate headquarters. Yet, with the continent importing an estimated $90 billion in staple food commodities annually—a reliance that directly fuels currency depreciation and sticky inflation—the pressure to industrialise domestic food production has shifted from a development ambition into a macroeconomic imperative.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Africa Financial Industry Summit (AFIS) in Luanda, Aliou Maiga, Director of the Financial Institutions Group for Africa at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), revealed that the private-sector lending arm of the World Bank Group is rolling out a continental framework designed to solve agricultural finance once and for all.

The strategy marks a departure from the venture-capital model that previously pushed agritech startups to take on balance-sheet lending risk. Instead, the IFC is positioning agritech companies as digital origination and field-management engines, while channelling commercial bank liquidity into rural smallholder value chains backed by IFC risk-sharing guarantees.

“We have been looking for solutions in this space for about 20 years,” Maiga explained to TechCabal on Wednesday. “We explored the possibilities back then, but the technology was not sufficiently developed. We tried again about 10 years ago, but the conditions still weren't right. This time, we have identified 15 agritech companies across Africa, with coverage spanning much of the continent.”

Under this tripartite model, the IFC provides direct equity investment to these 15 vetted agritech firms to help them complete product development and achieve commercial scale. Rather than forcing these startups to raise expensive debt to lend directly to farmers—a practice that has strained balance sheets across the African tech ecosystem—the IFC connects them directly to its continental network of nearly 200 commercial banks and institutional lenders.

The agritech firms originate the farmers, assess agricultural risk, and manage the last-mile operational relationships. The commercial banks then disburse credit directly from their balance sheets, with IFC portfolio guarantees absorbing downside risk until lenders build their own underwriting confidence in the agricultural sector.

The macroeconomic motivation behind this capital engineering is urgent. African countries currently spend roughly $90 billion each year to import basic food staples such as rice, wheat, and sugar—commodities that could readily be cultivated on their own soil.

“Africa imports approximately $90 billion worth of food commodities, including rice, wheat and sugar. Yet, much of what we import could potentially be produced locally,” Maiga said. “The idea behind our work is to help Africa address its food security challenges, create jobs and increase productivity. Producing more food locally also reduces dependence on imports and can help moderate inflation because locally produced food is often cheaper. Ultimately, this has implications for interest rates as well, because inflation is one of the factors that influences interest rates.”

By dampening food inflation, which carries the largest weight in consumer price baskets across Sub-Saharan Africa, domestic agricultural productivity directly eases the monetary pressure that has forced central banks to maintain punishingly high benchmark interest rates.

Achieving this productivity, however, requires confronting the physical realities of the African smallholder. Unlike manufacturing or financial services, which have rapidly automated, African farming remains dominated by dispersed, rural smallholders who suffer from severe information deficits and low technical capability.

Maiga dismissed the notion that software alone can bridge this divide. In agriculture, pure-play digital platforms fail because rural producers cannot be served exclusively through smartphone applications. Instead, the IFC’s portfolio companies rely on a hybrid model that blends mobile technology with physical community agent networks.

“Our approach is to combine technology with agents on the ground, usually recruited from the communities where farmers operate,” Maiga observed. “These agents are physically present and equipped with devices that enable them to identify and address farmers’ day-to-day challenges. Through this approach, we can improve agricultural productivity and yields. In some cases, yields have increased by as much as 50%.”

These field agents use connected handheld devices to conduct soil diagnostics, track weather disruptions, schedule fertiliser application, and monitor crop health, translating agronomic data into actionable guidance for farmers.

Beyond technology and commercial bank balance sheets, Maiga emphasised that the agritech sector cannot scale without regulatory alignment from national and regional governments.

The IFC is actively integrating its agritech framework into broader state initiatives, including a flagship agricultural programme launched with the Nigerian government, as well as formal agreements being negotiated with sub-national administrations across key markets.

These sovereign agreements are designed to establish specific production targets, guarantee access to infrastructure, and remove regulatory bottlenecks across the entire value chain.

Once these state commitments are secured, the IFC coordinates with farmer cooperatives, agritech platforms, and commercial lenders to disburse funds and systematically measure the impact on yields.

For Africa’s agritech sector, which has struggled through successive funding winters and tech downturns, the shift in institutional backing signals a strategic maturation.

By pairing field-level technology with the balance sheets of mainstream commercial banks, the IFC is attempting to convert smallholder agriculture from an uninsurable charity case into an investable, productive commercial engine.