Absa Renews IT partnership with NTT DATA to upgrade African financial systems

The five-year agreement delegates enterprise software management to the IT provider, aiming to streamline the bank's accounting processes and cross-border data reporting.

Lauren Wortmann, Managing Director of Application Services at NTT DATA in the Middle East and Africa. 

Global IT services provider NTT DATA has signed a five-year contract extension with Absa, one of Africa’s largest banking and financial services groups. The agreement tasks NTT DATA with managing the bank's core financial software applications as the institution continues to restructure its corporate accounting infrastructure.

Absa operates across multiple African countries, which requires complex, large-scale financial reporting. To manage this volume of information, the bank relies on SAP S/4HANA, a high-performance enterprise resource planning (ERP) software designed to process massive amounts of corporate data in real-time.

Under the renewed partnership, NTT DATA will provide application management services (AMS). In practice, this means the technology firm will be responsible for maintaining, updating, and troubleshooting Absa's SAP software environment to ensure continuous operation.

Streamlining corporate accounting

The project specifically targets the bank's financial consolidation landscape. In corporate finance, consolidation is the process of gathering and unifying financial data from various regional branches and subsidiaries into a single, centralized ledger.

By upgrading these systems, Absa aims to standardize its financial controls and significantly accelerate its "close cycles"—the period required to finalize accounting books and report earnings at the end of a month, quarter, or fiscal year.

John Annandale, Absa's Managing Executive for Financial Control Functions and Finance CIO, stated that the ongoing modernization aims to establish a reliable, centralized database for the bank's operations across the continent.

“Renewing and extending our partnership with NTT DATA ensures we have the specialist SAP capability and dependable operations to match the scale of our ambition, supporting stronger controls, faster close cycles and the data quality our business stakeholders expect,” Annandale said. He characterized the project as a "South Africa-led transformation with Africa-wide impact."

Lauren Wortmann, Managing Director of Application Services at NTT DATA in the Middle East and Africa, outlined the operational targets of the renewed contract.

“Our focus is on reliable operations, continuous improvement and measurable business outcomes that will help Absa strengthen controls and unlock real-time insights from a resilient S/4HANA foundation,” Wortmann stated.