Absa Cuts SME Onboarding to Under 30 Minutes as AI Adoption Accelerates

Absa Group says its technology investments are increasingly translating into measurable customer and business outcomes, with artificial intelligence, automation and digital platforms helping the bank improve service speed, credit access and operational resilience.

According to the Group’s H1 2026 technology performance update, one of the biggest improvements has been in SME banking, where account-opening turnaround times have fallen from two days to under 30 minutes.

Absa says straight-through processing has reduced SME onboarding time by 98.96%, allowing business customers to transact almost immediately.

Credit decisioning has also improved significantly. Financial spreading, which previously took between two and five days, can now be completed in around four hours, representing an improvement of up to 97%.

“Technology only matters when it changes the experience of customers and the performance of the business,” said Johnson Idesoh, Absa Group Chief Information and Technology Officer.

“In H1 2026, we saw that impact clearly: SMEs can open accounts in minutes, customers are receiving faster credit decisions, digital lending is growing strongly, service channels are becoming more responsive, and our platforms continue to operate with resilience.”

AI Moves Into Customer Service

Absa is also expanding the use of artificial intelligence across customer-facing and internal operations.

Its agentic AI chatbot processes more than 100,000 queries a month across a user base of approximately 1.6 million people. The system can interpret natural language, ask follow-up questions and provide personalised responses.

Within Business Banking, the chatbot supports all 11 official South African languages, with plans to expand the capability elsewhere in the organisation.

AI is also being applied to debt review processes, where Absa says process effectiveness has improved from 28% to 90%.

The bank is simultaneously scaling generative AI internally. More than 30,000 employees use Microsoft Copilot each month, while over 4,400 employees with access to Copilot Pro have created more than 3,800 automation agents.

More than 1,400 developers are also using AI-assisted coding tools including GitHub Copilot and Claude Code to accelerate software development.

Reliability Remains a Priority

Despite the focus on innovation, Absa says system resilience remains central to its technology strategy.

The Group recorded service availability of 99.97% during the period, with zero severity incidents reported. Its security systems also prevented more than 33,000 credential compromises.

Customer-service improvements included the deployment of Amazon Connect, which Absa says helped improve contact-centre response times by up to 21%, reduce average handling time by 14% and cut call-holding time by 44%.

Elsewhere, Absa Rewards added 430,000 new members during the first half of the year, while participation increased by 21%.

Absa is also expanding digital services across Africa. In Ghana, its Ghana Pay platform had more than 217,000 customers by July 2026 and processed approximately GHS6.6 million through its funds-transfer service.

The results point to a broader shift in Absa’s technology strategy, with the bank increasingly positioning technology as a core driver of customer experience, productivity, resilience and growth across its African operations.