Douglas Beckett, regional head of consumer banking at Standard Chartered explains the bank’s strategy in Africa, following its recent re-entry into South Africa and Nigeria. By Parveen Bansal.With its roots in both Asia and Africa, Standard Chartered Bank has emerged in the past 150 years as a leading financial institution in these markets. The present-day bank is the product of a 1969 merger between Standard Bank of South Africa and the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, the latter being the older institution, having been founded in 1835 following the grant of a Royal Charter from Queen Victoria.
South African company Aplitec saw a gap in the payments market and devised a cheaper alternative to the EMV standard. Stuart Theobald explains how this upstart company has stolen a march on the global card giants.Smart cards have heralded a technical revolution in payments systems across the globe. But the industry smart card standard Europay Mastercard Visa (EMV) is not without its challengers. One that has caught the attention of Visa particularly is a small South African IT company called Aplitec.
News that South Africa’s financial sector has agreed to an ambitious black empowerment charter has pushed financial stocks upwards. The government-endorsed charter sets down detailed empowerment targets for companies, paving the way for as much as 25% of the sector’s value to be in black ownership by 2010.