The 2026 Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Intelligent Finance Summit was held at Huawei’s Lianqiu Lake R&D Center in Shanghai, China, on May 21.It brought together more than 100 senior executives, industry experts, and technology leaders from financial institutions across eight African countries, alongside over 20 Huawei partners.The summit, themed “Resilience First, Intelligence Next”, focused on cloudification, mobility and resilience. It examined how financial institutions can address transformation challenges such as the digital divide, system vulnerabilities and emerging technology risks, while unlocking opportunities for sustainable growth.Huawei presented a digital and intelligent transformation roadmap for the African financial sector, progressing from cloudification and mobility towards resilience and, ultimately, intelligence.AI-led vision for African bankingJason Cao, CEO of the Huawei Digital Finance Business Unit, delivered a speech titled “Embrace AI and Build a New Financial Future in Africa”.He noted that over the next five to 10 years, artificial intelligence (AI) would become the primary driver of development in the financial industry. CEOs and CIOs across the global financial sector are increasingly seeking practical AI solutions.Cao reviewed the digital transformation of China’s financial sector over the past 10 to 15 years, during which it has made significant progress towards a cashless society, profoundly transforming the financial landscape.He emphasised that China’s experience could not simply be replicated, and must instead be adapted to the local realities of each African country.By leveraging cutting-edge technology and global best practices, and through collaboration with local partners, Huawei aims to support the digital and intelligent transformation of African countries and help build a more resilient and dynamic future for the region’s financial sectors.Victor Guo, president of Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Enterprise Business. (Huawei) Victor Guo, president of Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Enterprise Business, reaffirmed the company’s “In Africa, for Africa” approach. It has been operating in Africa for 28 years, serving 83% of the population across 27 countries and cooperating with 85% of leading banks in the region.Huawei aims to work with African banks as they move from IT to digital transformation to AI innovation, entering a new era of intelligent finance.To address the challenges of financial inclusion, cloud and application modernisation, and system resilience, Huawei has proposed a path built on a fintech core and a data and AI platform, using super apps to integrate e-wallets, payments, microloans and risk controls to support customer acquisition.Cloudification and resilience underpin banking transformationCloudification is increasingly a core driver of financial transformation, as institutions move towards cloud-native architectures to improve agility, elasticity and innovation. In terms of cloud transformation, Huawei offers a combination of four types of clouds: public cloud, private cloud, dedicated cloud, and edge cloud. This combination meets data compliance requirements and has been successfully implemented in leading banks in South Africa.From multi-active architectures to deep AI integration, and from cloud-native to data-ready systems, the world’s leading banks are reshaping their technology foundations with a “resilience-first” approach. High-resilience infrastructure is emerging as a key engine driving growth and trust.Huawei supports customers with its “Two-Site Three-Data Centre” disaster recovery architecture, which can be deployed within cloud environments to enhance resilience and support business continuity.This provides a recovery point objective of zero for core services and a recovery time objective of less than two minutes. Faults are detected within one minute, diagnosed within three minutes, and recovered within five minutes. Six layers of anti-ransomware protection enhance security.Banks reflect on Huawei collaborationAcross the region, leading financial institutions are working with Huawei to enhance service delivery, operational efficiency, and long-term competitiveness through cloud and AI-enabled solutions.Tsebeletso Mashau, Africa Regions CIO and group deputy CIO for Retail at Standard Bank Group in South Africa. (Huawei) Tsebeletso Mashau, Africa Regions CIO and Group Deputy CIO Retail at Standard Bank South Africa, detailed the bank’s digital transformation journey.She noted that evolving client expectations, competitive pressures, and regulatory requirements had accelerated the shift towards cloudification as a central driver of business and organisational change. Mashau underscored that digitalisation was fundamentally about using technology to enhance the pace and responsiveness of financial services by leveraging platforms, data, and automation to deliver faster, smarter, and more adaptive customer experiences. Standard Bank Group is deepening its strategic cooperation with Huawei across Africa, focusing on Cloud, AI, data, storage and network innovation. The aim is to create high-performance, highly resilient, and customer-centric next-generation banking solutions. At the technical architecture level, the bank is committed to simplifying its technology landscape. By unifying applications, infrastructure and governance standards, it is building a future-oriented cloud-native architecture designed to improve system performance in terms of elasticity, security and cost-effectiveness. This is seen as the foundation for driving market leadership and sustainable growth across Africa.Bruce Mwile, COO of CRDB Bank in Tanzania. (Huawei) Bruce Mwile, COO of CRDB Bank in Tanzania, emphasised that resilience was not merely an IT objective, but a business and trust imperative. Only resilient institutions can scale intelligence, embed AI responsibly, and deliver always on digital banking at continental scale. This mindset has contributed to CRDB’s strong FY2025 performance, with the bank achieving industry-leading results across key metrics, such as asset quality, deposits and returns. It also received 55 awards last year, including recognition as the best digital bank.More importantly, it has enabled CRDB to undergo a broader digital transformation in which technology has evolved from being a support function to a strategic growth engine. Looking ahead, AI is expected to power credit decisions, fraud prevention, customer engagement and operational efficiency, underpinned by strong data foundations and robust AI governance.CRDB’s partnership with Huawei continues to evolve beyond infrastructure, focusing on resilience, cloud adoption and the integration of AI into banking operations. The next horizon: to build a resilient, AI-driven and customer-centric bank that redefines the delivery of financial services across Africa.Amon Ngechu, CTO of Digital Business at NCBA Bank in Kenya. (Huawei) Amon Ngechu, CTO of Digital Business at NCBA Bank in Kenya, said that resilient infrastructure was not only a technology upgrade, but a cornerstone of business growth. NCBA plans to deepen its cooperation with Huawei to provide more reliable, efficient and intelligent digital financial services for customers and partners across Africa.With a vision of “unlocking unlimited financial opportunities in Africa”, NCBA is building a Pan-African digital platform that integrates bank-centric and mobile money-centric payment schemes and organises information and capital flows. In terms of technical architecture, its flexible cloud-native design, layered and simplified integration, and separation of Online Transaction Processing and Online Analytical Processing workloads, are intended to reduce operation and maintenance, while enabling a unified global platform that supports services in multiple countries. When it comes to infrastructure resilience, NCBA has upgraded from an active/standby architecture to a high-availability setup based on Huawei OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage. This has improved system availability and reduced average core system latency, reducing close-of-business processing times and transaction failures.Trust and cooperationThe summit concluded with the Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Gala Dinner, where Yang Lin, Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Finance Business Department director, said trust and cooperation were the cornerstones of the company’s relationship with its customers.“Huawei has always been committed to supporting its customers in addressing challenges and achieving growth through leading technological solutions,” he said.“The deep, long-term relationships built over time, much like financial resilience, enable both sides to move steadily forward in a changing environment. Huawei has always worked hand in hand with its customers to build a better future together.”Yang Lin, director of the Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Finance Business Department. (Huawei) A key takeaway from the summit was that resilience is no longer optional but central to financial security.In partnership with local banks, Huawei says it has elevated the availability of core systems from 98.5% to 99.99%. This advancement has achieved near-zero fault tolerance and recovery times measured in minutes. Intelligence has also shifted from an enhancement to a primary driver of growth.By leveraging technology, Huawei is empowering its clients in the Sub-Saharan African financial industry to advance intelligent finance through resilient architectures, open ecosystems and localised collaborations.This article was sponsored by Huawei.