Tag: EY Africa

The updated South African National Budget for 2025, tabled on 12 March, tries to balance the need to address the country's fiscal challenges. At the same time, it aims to stimulate economic growth and improve public services. Over and above these priorities, it also balances political pressure from the Government of National Unity (GNU).

Traditional South African banks, and their associated dated computer systems, were not designed for the breadth of operations required in modern banking and are rapidly falling off the pace of current banking demands.  Each advance in services offering, such as when customers started to use ATMs, demanded a wider range of features.

The Constitutional Court clarified that businesses registered as taxpayers would benefit from temporary tax relief when claiming future costs from current income received under contracts that are inextricably linked. The Future Expenditure Tax Allowance essentially grants a business temporary relief by reducing its tax payable to SARS if the income received upfront will be wholly or partially used to fund future costs.

Intelligent Automation (IA) is simply the use of new technologies to help organisations improve the way they operate. And it may be the ‘digital antidote’ to combating COVID-19 because it is so well suited to solving a number of the business challenges created by the pandemic.   

South Africa’s telecommunications (telcos) companies need to rapidly evolve by adding additional services for a new mobile working and learning world in order to stay relevant and profitable.  Their legacy business model of telcos which has long sold data and SMS packages to consumers, is no longer enough on its own - a fact that has been brought into stark relief throughout the lockdown period. 

The idea of a digital state where different areas of government digitise data and collaborate to provide services for its citizens has been a long stated ambition for the South African government, as part of its push to embrace the 4th industrial revolution - but now it’s more important than ever.

Over the years it became clear that financial statements on their own did not tell the whole story of a company’s performance. Companies therefore started reporting on their environmental impacts, employee-related issues and corporate social responsibility issues.