Why operational agility is becoming the next competitive frontier for African banks

Micaela Suárez, CEO of Flokzu.

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As banks across Africa continue to invest in digital channels, a growing gap is becoming harder to ignore: many customer experiences have been digitised, but the operational workflows behind them often remain manual, fragmented and difficult to scale.

Flokzu, a cloud-based no-code/low-code business process management (BPM) and workflow automation platform, says this operational layer is becoming one of the next major battlegrounds for banking transformation.

Part of Hyperclear Tech, the company points to its work with Absa Bank Mauritius as an example of how financial institutions can scale automation beyond isolated departmental projects. Using Flokzu, Absa Bank Mauritius automated more than 120 business processes across different areas of the organisation and reduced a customer onboarding workflow to approximately 15 minutes.

According to Micaela Suárez, CEO of Flokzu, the case reflects a broader challenge facing banks across the continent.

“Many banks have modernised the customer interface, but the operational core behind that experience has not always evolved at the same pace,” says Suárez. “That gap is where delays, compliance risks and customer frustration often begin.”

Across African financial institutions, critical processes such as customer onboarding, procurement approvals, compliance management, contract administration, governance workflows and internal approvals often still depend on e-mails, spreadsheets, paper-based documents and disconnected systems.

These inefficiencies rarely appear as one single problem. In banking, they show up as delayed onboarding, slow internal approvals, duplicated data entry, missing audit trails, unclear ownership and limited visibility into service-level performance.

“The issue is not that banks have failed to invest in technology,” says Suárez. “The issue is that technology investment alone is not enough if the underlying processes remain fragmented, manual and difficult to measure.”

Manual workflows create costs that are not always immediately visible. They reduce visibility into process performance, make it difficult to identify bottlenecks, increase compliance risk and slow down service delivery.

For managers, this often means limited real-time insight into where delays occur or which teams are overloaded. For employees, it means spending valuable time chasing approvals, searching for information or updating spreadsheets instead of focusing on higher-value work.

For customers, the impact is felt through slower responses, inconsistent experiences and unnecessary friction.

“Customer experience is increasingly shaped by what happens behind the screen,” says Suárez. “A faster digital interface is not enough if the internal process behind it still depends on manual handoffs, e-mails and spreadsheets.”

For Flokzu, the experience of Absa Bank Mauritius shows the value of approaching workflow automation as an organisational capability rather than a one-off technology project.

Instead of limiting automation to a single department or function, the bank scaled workflow automation across more than 120 processes. This helped improve process visibility, strengthen governance and accelerate service delivery across different areas of the organisation.

This is where Suárez believes many transformation programmes succeed or fail.

“Too often, organisations digitise customer-facing interactions while leaving internal workflows unchanged,” she says. “But the customer experience is only as strong as the operational process behind it.”

No-code and low-code BPM platforms allow business and operations teams to design, automate and improve workflows without depending entirely on software development teams. At the same time, they help organisations maintain governance, traceability, process visibility and operational control.

This is particularly relevant for banks, where agility must be balanced with compliance, security and accountability.

The African banking sector faces a unique combination of pressures. Financial inclusion initiatives continue to expand customer bases, regulatory requirements are becoming more complex, fintech competition continues to intensify and economic uncertainty is increasing pressure on institutions to improve efficiency and control operational costs.

In this environment, operational agility is becoming a competitive advantage.

Banks that can adapt processes quickly, eliminate unnecessary friction, improve visibility and maintain strong governance will be better positioned to respond to changing market conditions and rising customer expectations.

Importantly, achieving this does not always require large-scale technology replacement projects. In many cases, significant gains can be achieved by addressing the workflow inefficiencies that have accumulated over time between people, systems, documents, approvals and data.

“The next phase of banking transformation will not be measured only by new apps or digital channels,” says Suárez. “It will be measured by how quickly, safely and transparently banks can execute the processes behind every customer interaction.”

Digital transformation is entering a new phase. The conversation is moving beyond technology adoption and into operational execution.

Success will increasingly be determined not only by the systems an organisation deploys, but by how effectively those systems enable faster decisions, stronger governance and better customer experiences.

“The lesson from Absa Bank Mauritius is not simply that automation works,” concludes Suárez. “It is that sustainable transformation happens when process improvement becomes part of how the organisation operates every day. For banks competing on speed, trust and service quality, that capability is becoming a strategic differentiator.”