Banking & Insurance

Digitalisation was already a key theme in the growth strategies of financial services providers before the global COVID-19 pandemic struck. The need to innovate in response to shifting customer demands around engagement and experience, rising industry disruption from digital-native challenger banks or pivots from major digital-native businesses, and the need to respond to a dynamic regulatory environment has spurred digital transformation and entrenched an innovation agenda across the industry.

Originally, the Venda Building Society, VBS Mutual Bank was a small, little-known lender in Limpopo before it rocketed from obscurity in 2016 by giving President Jacob Zuma a controversial home loan to repay the state for improvements to his Nkandla homestead.

The Financial Intelligence Centre Act, 38 of 2001 (FIC Act), places an obligation on accountable institutions to identify clients, to keep record of transactions, to report various transactions and to take measures to promote compliance with the provisions of the FIC Act. 

Our latest findings on State of Cyber Resilience shows that cyberattacks on insurers have more than doubled (from 240 to 519 attacks, on average), illustrating the current cyber climate for insurers: It’s volatile. This number is more than twice as much as the cross-industry cyber resilience leaders in the survey and over three times more than their banking peers.

2020 is not coming up roses in the economy department and all indicators point to a tough year for consumers. In tough times, looking for ways to cut back, save, and make your money work harder for you, is always a good idea.

As economic recovery slowly picks up, and the industry waits to see whether government’s ambitious infrastructure-led recovery materialises, it’s never been more important for contractors to ensure they are fighting fit and best positioned to take advantage of every opportunity that comes their way.

The banking group is hopeful that impairments will decline, and client activity will continue to improve as the year progresses. Nedbank believes the worst may be behind it after suffering a large decline in first-half earnings due to what is has billed as the Great Lockdown Crisis (GLC).

Financial services providers (FSPs) registered under the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act 2002 fall within the ambit of ‘accountable institutions’ under the Financial Intelligence Centre Act 2001. As accountable institutions, these FSPs are obliged to comply with the FIC Act and are subject to oversight by the FSCA.

Experian - a consumer, business and credit information services agency – has experienced a breach of data which has exposed some personal information of as many as 24 million South Africans and 793,749 business entities to a suspected fraudster.

What are your rights when an online transaction goes wrong? The worldwide pandemic, and associated lockdown, have brought about many changes in consumer behaviour. One of which is the surge in online shopping. As South African consumers adapt to the new normal, where traditional ways of shopping are largely discouraged in favour of online shopping (in an effort to promote social distancing), the number of card-not-present transactions (card transactions that occur while the buyer and seller are not in the same place) has increased exponentially.