Across Africa, women are among the continent’s most powerful economic catalysts.  Women are starting businesses at the highest rates globally, sustaining SMEs and reinvesting earnings back into families and communities. Yet despite their contribution, women entrepreneurs continue to face systemic barriers to finance, leadership and opportunity.

In this thought leadership piece published by Forbes Africa, Prabashni Naidoo, Chief Governance Officer at Absa Group, explores why unlocking women’s economic agency is essential to Africa’s growth story. Drawing on insights from global economic discussions and Absa’s pan-African experience, the article makes a clear case: investing in women-led enterprises is a growth strategy.

As a purpose-led African financial institution, Absa remains committed to co‑creating inclusive systems that enable women not only to participate in the economy, but to shape its future.

By Lindelani Ramukumba

Rewind just a few years and large language models and generative artificial intelligence were barely on the public radar, yet the technology has already evolved into its next iteration: agentic AI, a new breed of systems that are semi- or fully autonomous and able to reason and act on their own. And adoption has skyrocketed, particularly over the past year.

According to a recent PwC survey, 79% of senior executives globally say AI agents are already being adopted in their organisations in one form or another, which is a striking level of uptake for such a nascent technology. One might assume that agentic AI has not yet reached South African shores, but it is already being implemented at scale, particularly in the financial services sector, where early deployments are delivering measurable gains in efficiency and productivity. For customers, it means faster service, more personalised interactions, quicker resolution of everyday banking needs, and less time spent navigating routine processes.

Take the customer acquisition stage as an example. Onboarding a small or medium-sized business has traditionally taken several hours spread across multiple days, with relationship managers collecting documents, verifying business registration, conducting Know Your Customer (KYC) checks, assessing credit risk, and configuring products across different systems. That level of manual work drives up the cost of acquiring each customer, which in turn limits how widely banks can serve the market, often forcing them to prioritise larger, higher-value clients over smaller businesses.

Now imagine compressing that process into roughly 20 minutes through automation, using tools such as biometric identity verification, automated Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) lookups, real-time credit bureau integration, and instant KYC orchestration. Suddenly the economics change and banks can serve segments that were previously not viable at scale, expanding their addressable market and opening the door to far broader financial inclusion. For the SME owner, it means being able to open a business banking account in minutes rather than days, with far less time spent navigating paperwork and administrative processes.

Many banks across South Africa have already begun investing in these technologies, particularly in business-critical operations, and their application across other areas of the banking value chain is expected to expand considerably through 2026.

In September last year, Absa, for example, partnered with cloud-based customer relationship management platform Salesforce to bring its enterprise agentic AI solution, Agentforce, into Africa for the first time, a development that carries important implications for the banking industry.

As part of this, three autonomous AI agents are being tested within the bank.

The first is a co-pilot designed to support relationship managers. Historically, much of their time was spent preparing for meetings rather than engaging customers, with as much as 75% of the workday going into reviewing customer data across multiple systems, analysing recent transactions, identifying potential opportunities, and compiling engagement notes. Only about 25% of their time was spent actually interacting with customers. The AI agent now automates much of that preparation by generating pre-meeting briefs, pulling together customer information from multiple systems, highlighting relevant transaction patterns, and capturing notes after engagements. This has effectively flipped that ratio, with administrative time reduced by between 75% and 90%, allowing relationship managers to spend far more of their time focused on customers.

Another agent focuses on customer enquiries. It operates as a multilingual support assistant capable of responding to common banking questions across 11 languages, including isiZulu, Sesotho, and isiXhosa. Early results show that around 40% of customer service queries are now resolved without human intervention, meaning four out of ten interactions can be handled instantly while maintaining response quality. In many cases, responses that once took customers up to 30 minutes to receive are now delivered immediately, with success rates of close to 99%. The third agent focuses on monitoring and resolving technical issues across systems. Operating around the clock, it can detect and address many problems automatically, reducing the time it takes to restore services and allowing teams to focus less on operational troubleshooting and more on supporting customers. Since its introduction, the agent has already handled more than 6,400 internal support queries with a success rate of about 96%, meaning the vast majority of issues are resolved without needing to escalate to technical support teams.

These examples offer a glimpse of how agentic AI is beginning to change the way banks operate and, more importantly, what customers can expect in the near future.

It is likely that more of this technology will be used to expand digital onboarding, allowing customers to open accounts or access services far more quickly and with less paperwork. Banks may also begin using AI to assess creditworthiness in new ways, analysing transaction patterns and cash flow behaviour rather than relying only on traditional balance sheet information. For small businesses in particular, this could mean quicker access to financing and more proactive offers when their financial activity shows they are able to support additional credit. At the same time, many routine banking interactions are likely to move into digital self-service channels, allowing customers to resolve simple requests instantly while still having access to human support when it is genuinely needed.

Agentic AI is still in its early stages, but its direction of travel is already becoming clear.

As these systems mature and banks become more comfortable deploying them in everyday operations, customers are likely to experience banking that is faster, more responsive, and increasingly personalised. Much of this change may happen in the background, but over time it will transform how people interact with their banks.

Lindelani Ramukumba, Chief Information Officer and Interim Chief Digital Officer of Absa Business Banking

By Bernard Vilakazi

For the 2026 fiscal year, the South African government has placed transport at the centre of its recovery strategy. In his recent Budget Speech, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana announced a raft of public-sector infrastructure spending set to exceed R1 trillion, much of it directed at transport and logistics, which he described as the “foundation upon which long-term economic growth, improved service delivery and job creation are built”.

Recent data indicates that over the past year, Transnet sustained improved operational performance, driven by increased rail volumes and progress in fleet renewal. In addition, according to the 2026 Budget Review, over the next three years Transnet plans to invest R76.6 billion to improve the efficiency and reliability of the logistics value chain, with the intention of enabling greater private-sector participation across key freight corridors, including iron ore, manganese, coal, chrome and containerised cargo. At the same time, the South African National Roads Agency will continue investing in both toll and non-toll roads, maintaining approximately 27,000 kilometers of the national road network and resurfacing around 2,000 kilometers annually to strengthen long-term network resilience and mobility. This level of investment is both welcome and necessary, and it signals that transport and logistics are rightly being recognised as central to economic development. But infrastructure alone will not resolve the pressures facing businesses on the ground, where the operating environment has become more demanding and less forgiving.

That matters because, despite its shortcomings, road is the dominant mode of transport in South Africa. According to recent findings from Stats SA, in the third quarter of 2025 road accounted for 85.5% of total freight volumes, compared with 14.5% moved by rail. Even for passenger transport, road carries 74.0% of the total, compared with rail’s 26.0% share. Rail investment is important and long overdue, but even under optimistic reform timelines, road transport will continue to carry the bulk of South Africa’s freight and passenger movement for years to come, which means the country’s growth ambitions will rest heavily on the resilience of road transport and warehousing businesses.

But that resilience cannot be taken for granted.

According to the Ctrack Transport and Freight Index, the road freight sector had another difficult year in 2025, following a 7.7% decline in payload in 2024 and a further 0.4% contraction in the first ten months of 2025. The storage and handling sub-sector also declined by 2.3% in 2025, marking a fourth consecutive year of contraction. Inventory levels have trended lower, partly due to subdued domestic demand as well as structural shifts driven by improved efficiencies and technology in warehousing and inventory management.

There is a perception that the sector is being weighed down by congestion, logistics bottlenecks, and infrastructure constraints, and that is not wrong. But in many cases, when transport and logistics businesses fail, it is not only macro conditions that determine the outcome. More often, the pressure shows up in working capital and cash flow management, and many of these challenges could be mitigated through earlier and more deliberate conversations about how the working capital cycle is structured.

Take a simple example: securing finance for a new truck. It is often seen as the starting point for launching or expanding a transport business. But if payment terms run to 60 days and there is no provision to cover fuel, variable costs, and fixed expenses over that period, the business begins operating under strain from day one. Without a clear understanding of that working capital cycle, even a well-run operation can become vulnerable, and failure is too easily attributed to congestion or broader inefficiencies rather than to the way the cash flow was structured. This is where financiers can misjudge the sector, viewing it as inherently high risk rather than recognising the opportunity that exists when risk is properly understood and structured. With the right industry insight and disciplined financial structuring, transport and logistics can be financed in a way that strengthens long-term sustainability.

Getting this right requires a more informed and nuanced assessment of risk, one that recognises how factors such as route economics, border delays, fuel volatility, and contract structures influence cash flow in real time. With better use of data, telematics, and digital platforms, it is possible to assess performance with greater precision and structure tailored financial solutions that align more closely with how businesses actually operate.

Most importantly, attention needs to turn to how road transport and logistics fit into the more integrated national transport system that is coming. It has never really been about road versus rail; it is about how road and rail work together, alongside ports and air. Road will most likely always handle the first and last mile, and warehousing and storage will still play an important role. The task is to support the businesses carrying the bulk of the workload today while also preparing them to transition into that more connected future, particularly if South Africa is serious about improving competitiveness and driving sustainable growth.

Bernard Vilakazi, Sector Specialist for Transport and Logistics at Absa Business Banking

By Adesoji Solanke

Back in 2014, two blockchain pioneers set out to solve a problem confronting the early cryptocurrency ecosystem: the extreme price volatility of Bitcoin and the first generation of altcoins made them difficult to use for everyday transactions and impractical as a reliable medium of exchange. Their answer came from an experimental blockchain platform called BitShares, where a token known as BitUSD was designed to track the value of the US dollar.

Users could create the token by locking up the network’s native cryptocurrency, BitShares (BTS), as collateral inside a smart contract, with the idea that the system would maintain a dollar-equivalent value through overcollateralisation and market incentives. For a time, the model appeared to work. BitUSD became the world’s first stablecoin and circulated within a small but growing ecosystem of early cryptocurrency exchanges as a way for traders to move between assets without returning to the banking system.

But because BitUSD was backed by BitShares, sharp swings in the price of the underlying token undermined the mechanism intended to maintain the peg, and by 2018 the system entered forced settlement after becoming under-collateralised. The peg broke and the token gradually faded from relevance, joining a growing list of early attempts at digital dollars that proved more fragile than their designers expected. The idea, however, survived the failure. If anything, BitUSD demonstrated that the demand for a digital representation of the dollar inside financial networks was real, even if the first attempts to engineer it were not robust enough to sustain it.

Today, the stablecoin market is booming – especially in Africa.

According to a new report by BVNK, stablecoin supply has increased by more than 500% over the past five years, pushing the total market value above US$300 billion. The report also found that ownership is more widespread in low and middle-income economies (60%) than in high-income ones (45%), with Africa leading at 79%. Over the past 12 months, the continent has also recorded the fastest growth in stablecoin holdings, driven largely by activity in Nigeria and South Africa.

Data from Yellow Card points to the same trend across the continent. Stablecoins accounted for 43% of total cryptocurrency transaction volume in sub-Saharan Africa in 2024. Nigeria emerged as the largest market, recording nearly $22 billion in transactions between July 2023 and June 2024. South Africa, meanwhile, has seen stablecoins displace bitcoin as its most widely used digital asset, with volumes growing by around 50% month-on-month since October 2023.

Much of the uptake stems from long-standing frictions in how money moves across African markets.

In economies where access to hard currency is constrained, stablecoins are being used as an additional channel for holding and transferring dollar-denominated value. They are also reducing the cost and time associated with remittances and cross-border payments, allowing funds to move between individuals and businesses without passing through multiple settlement layers. For payment companies operating across several jurisdictions, they are being used as a treasury tool to move liquidity between markets without tying up working capital in prefunded accounts.

They are also appearing in the labour market, where African professionals working for international firms are receiving compensation directly in digital dollars, preserving the value of their earnings in volatile currency environments.

These use cases are also beginning to intersect with existing payment infrastructure across the continent. In East Africa especially, stablecoins are appearing alongside mobile money platforms, as infrastructure providers build on- and off-ramps between digital dollars and local currencies that allow them to move within the same payment workflows used for everyday transactions.

The uptake is also being supported by a regulatory environment that is gradually taking shape across the continent. Mauritius was among the early movers in establishing frameworks for digital asset businesses, while Kenya and Ghana have introduced regulatory regimes for Virtual Asset Service Providers. Uganda and South Africa are moving toward greater supervisory clarity, with regulators in many other markets also engaging directly with industry participants through roundtables and live demonstrations of how these systems operate in practice.

This is not to say there are not legitimate concerns around regulatory reporting, consumer protection, and the potential impact of widespread USD-denominated stablecoins on domestic monetary policy. However, the trajectory suggests that policymakers recognise stablecoins as an enduring feature of the financial landscape. The task now is to craft proportionate frameworks that manage these risks while allowing the technology to develop within the continent’s financial system.

In the near term, several developments are likely to determine the next phase of stablecoin adoption across the continent. Integration with wallets, mobile network operators and the emergence of local currency stablecoins, could deepen domestic use by building on existing payment habits. At the same time, consumer-facing innovation that removes technical complexity will matter; most users will not need to understand blockchains in order to benefit from them. Deeper integration with banks may prove to be the real inflection point, particularly as custody, liquidity provision and treasury services begin scaling stablecoin applications into areas such as trade finance and supply-chain payments. Whether the ecosystem matures into a cohesive network will also depend on interoperability between fintechs, banks and infrastructure providers rather than the development of fragmented systems.

Adesoji Solanke, Head of Fintech & Banks Investment Banking Origination, Absa CIB

By Abdul Yassim and Mosa Tshabalala

Before 2008, global banks operated through expansive cross-border networks, tiering markets into core and peripheral exposures and managing trade flows accordingly, but in the wake of the global financial crisis, regulators reassessed the risks embedded in those balance sheets, capital requirements tightened, and international banks began concentrating their activities closer to home. In many so-called frontier markets, they turned to regional partners to support their transactional and investment banking activities, relying on local balance sheets and compliance infrastructure to intermediate trade. In Africa, that meant deeper engagement with domestic and regional banks that could facilitate cross-border transactions on the continent.

Trade hubs became gateways into the continent, allowing local banks to intermediate trade for global partners with greater confidence, and for those partners the priorities were straightforward: certainty of payment, speed of settlement, and competitive pricing.

Those priorities still matter today, and whether they’re delivered in practice depends on how quickly capital moves through the transaction.

Take an everyday transaction: an order comes in, and raw materials, labour, production, and transport all have to be funded before a single payment is received. By the time goods cross a border, weeks may already have passed, and settlement can take longer still where processes are uneven, or payment terms extend across jurisdictions. If trade credit, supplier finance, or receivables discounting are not readily available, even modest delays begin to strain the balance sheet.

That has implications beyond the business itself, including for those financing and investing in it.

Supply chain finance therefore becomes pivotal to intra-African trade, particularly for foreign investors allocating capital into the region. By advancing funds against approved invoices and verified trade flows, it shortens the distance between shipment and payment and gives investors clearer visibility into how transactions perform over time. As that cycle becomes more consistent, capital can be committed at scale without demanding wide buffers for uncertainty.

However, despite an estimated supply chain finance market on the continent exceeding $60 billion, UNCTAD suggests that only between 7% and 25% of demand is currently met, and Afreximbank reports that just 18% of African banks’ SCF portfolios are directed toward intra-African trade. That imbalance means a significant share of cross-border trade operates without consistent, structured working capital support, and it is here that foreign investors eyeing opportunities on the continent can find their entry point. Backing Africa’s trade expansion does not require creating new demand; it requires financing trade that is already moving but under-served. And for that capital to scale comfortably, the financial infrastructure around intra-African trade has to become more coherent.

Regional trade becomes expensive to finance when too much of the transaction sits in separate systems that do not talk to each other. A buyer may know a supplier well, and a supplier may trust a buyer, but once a bank or insurer steps in, it often has to piece together the transaction from scattered documents and inconsistent settlement records, and the cost of that reconstruction shows up in pricing.

This is why it is important to develop stronger regional digital supply chain platforms. These are shared tools that bring buyers, suppliers, logistics providers, and financiers onto the same transactional record, linking confirmed orders, shipment updates and payment data in a way that can be accessed across borders. They reduce the need for each institution to independently reconstruct a deal from fragments, and instead allow financing decisions to rest on a verified record of what has actually been traded and settled.

But the effectiveness of regional platforms ultimately depends on the quality of the data flowing into them. UNCTAD research finds that businesses that use digital technologies such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, electronic invoicing and integrated data platforms are better positioned to access SCF because they generate more consistent and transparent transaction records. African banks have also developed in-house digital SCF portals that allow their corporate clients to onboard suppliers and manage invoice finance programmes online. By automating processes that were previously manual and paper-heavy, these platforms have reduced administrative costs and made it commercially viable to include smaller suppliers who would once have been too expensive to serve.

The way risk is measured also needs to change. Much of trade-linked lending on the continent still leans heavily on fixed security, property and guarantees, assets that smaller firms either do not have or cannot pledge without choking their own operations. Transaction data provides a different basis for judgement: repeated orders, buyer payment behaviour, settlement timing, dispute frequency, the ordinary signals of whether a business performs. When lenders can rely on that record, funding can be structured around what the firm does rather than what it owns, and that is how SCF moves from being an instrument used by a few large anchor programmes to something that changes who can participate in regional trade.

When lenders can rely on that record, funding can be structured around what the business does rather than what it owns, and that is what allows capital to move more confidently into intra-African trade at scale.

Abdul Yassim, Head: Trade and Working Capital South Africa and Mosa Tshabalala, Head: Institutional Trade and DSI Sales, Absa CIB