Technology now accounts for a fifth of Investec’s total costs as the lender invests in modernising its platforms while progressing with a cloud investment programme and increasing outlay into AI. In recent years financial services companies have ploughed billions of rand into a strategy to give their operations a more digital flavour having largely been seen as laggards, particularly compared with new digital lenders and fintech operators. South Africa’s biggest banks have had to retrofit new systems onto the old ones, with varying levels of success. It is not just one bank’s problem as the industry has to invest as a collective in upgrading systems.(Karen Moolman) For Investec, this effort resulted in information technology expenditure accounting for about 20% of its overall cost base, reaching £246m (R5.4bn) in the year ended March. “We actually spent about 50% of that on areas of growth and enhancing our platforms,” group finance director Nishlan Samujh said during a presentation of the group’s earnings. “That includes implementation of new-age technology into the organisation, as well as modernisation of our platforms.” Investec is listed on the JSE and London Stock Exchange. Several platform upgrades are in progress, with key deliveries scheduled to go online over the next one to two financial years “which is going to bring significant change”, said Samujh. Referencing the rapid evolution of external AI developments, such as Anthropic’s Mythos release a few weeks ago, Samujh noted that the bank is heavily integrating AI agents.This is part of a growing trend known as “agentic AI”, in which systems take over more tasks from humans. For example, an agent can function like a personal assistant, making bookings, scheduling meetings and summarising notes and other important information.Samujh highlighted that Investec features 7,700 permanent employees working alongside 800 AI agents deeply embedded in the organisation. “If any of you have picked up our analyst booklet, that booklet was reviewed by one of our agents,” he said to investors during the presentation. While early benefits are emerging, he noted it is still too soon to precisely quantify their total long-term impact. “To some extent, we’re starting to see the benefit, but it is still early to measure where that leads to,” he said. Samujh emphasised that while AI acceleration speeds up delivery, the bank retains full structural responsibility to review, check and properly deploy machine-written code rather than blindly trusting it.“From a cyber perspective we remain highly vigilant. We are close to new-age development and have access in the right places.… But our responsibility is to make sure that we have the right ways to deploy.”“At the end of the day, we need to be able to check and understand what has been deployed. So it’s not just accepting code because it’s been written by a machine. [We] have the responsibility to make sure that that code is actually deployed correctly.” Despite the heavy upfront technology spend, Investec remains committed to its targeted organisational cost-to-income ratio benchmark of 52%-54%.In 2025-28, Investec is deploying £282m (about R6.2bn) to transform its platforms. Samujh said this capital is being deployed into the group’s global lending and transactional banking platforms, focused on improving client experience and supporting scale growth, and expanding its international wealth and investment capabilities. Investec is not the only local lender investing in IT and its AI capabilities. In its annual results, Capitec said it is investing heavily in its AI capabilities as part of a push to stand out in an increasingly digitalised world of payments and personal finance.Recently Visa announced that FNB and Discovery Bank were part of a group of lenders in Europe, the Middle East and Africa stress-testing its AI agent platform.