Tag: customer experience (CX)

Every South African should care about open banking. It would give consumers more control over their financial data and empower them to use the banking services that best meet their needs. Open banking promises to reinvent the way consumers view and interact with financial products and services.

A blueprint is emerging for online retailers in South Africa. Ahead of Amazon entering the local market, setting up a titanic battle for customers with market leader Takealot, a new study shows that there is not only room for new entrants, but also opportunity for growth for incumbents.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) play a significant role in the global economy and offer an untapped opportunity for Communications Service Providers (CSPs). As they emerge from the pandemic, SMEs have been spending more across a range of technologies, with spending on IT and digital services set to increase by 7.6% CAGR to reach $1.7 trillion by 2026.

The adoption of accelerated, or automated underwriting, which uses advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to evaluate risk and underwrite life insurance, has been limited to date. This can partly be attributed to insurers cautiously rolling out automated decision-making, opting instead for small-scale improvements to risk frameworks.

The 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR), driven by the rapid pace of disruptive innovation and exponential technological breakthroughs, has changed the way we live, work and interact with each other. It is characterised by unprecedented processing power, storage, access to knowledge and the blurring of lines between physical, digital, and biological space.

As technologies continue to evolve, digital signage now seamlessly integrates into the everyday lives of consumers and brands. The integration of digital signage into consumers’ lives in the retail and Quick-Service Restaurant (QSR) sectors, in particular, has resulted in digital signage trends often times mirroring the concerns and changes that are important to consumers, making for a more efficient brand-consumer relationship with reliability and consistency being the key focus.

The world of financial services is changing – for the better. A multitude of virtual banking and payment options, cardless and accountless services, and now, Banking as a Service (BaaS) are making financial inclusion the norm instead of a privilege.

In the second part of this two-part series, I outline the skills that will be required by present-day HR professionals – for now and into the future. The future of work will place an extraordinary demand on HR professionals to lead their organisations strategically through this disruptive period.

An application programming interface (Open API) provides standards for how different software communicate with each other. Taking it a step further, an Open API specification (OAS) allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of a service without requiring access to its source code.

In this two-part series, I outline the skills that will be required by present-day HR Professionals – for now and into the future. Due to the increasing automated and digitised world in which HR professionals need to serve their stakeholders, as well as the added intricacy of a VUCA environment, all HR professionals will need to upskill and reskill themselves to meet the challenges of this Future World of Work.