After several years of rapid digital expansion, Africa’s banking and financial services sector is entering what Deloitte describes as a new phase of “streamlined growth,” with profitability, operational resilience, and digital resilience rising sharply as strategic priorities.
The fifth edition of the African Financial Industry Barometer, produced by Deloitte and the Africa Financial Summit, is based on a survey conducted between May and September of last year among executives from more than 70 institutions, spanning banks, insurers, fintechs, microfinance institutions, and capital markets players across the continent.
For software testing and QA teams inside financial institutions, the findings point to an environment where digital transformation is no longer framed as a competitive differentiator alone, but increasingly as a prerequisite that must be validated, secured, and governed through stronger resilience practices.
Ambroise Depouilly, managing partner at Deloitte Francophone Africa, argued that “the African financial sector has entered a phase of maturity,” with confidence high and fundamentals strengthening.
But he stressed that the remaining hurdles are now those of execution rather than expansion: “The remaining challenges, cybersecurity, data quality and availability, interoperability, are those of an ecosystem being built, not defended.”
That shift has direct implications for how African banks test systems, manage cyber risk, and prepare for AI-driven transformation.
One of the clearest signals from the Barometer is the elevation of cybersecurity from a technical issue into a board-level strategic concern.
The report found that more than half of executives rank cybersecurity among their top concerns, up sharply fromj just over a third the year before.
Institutions are increasingly viewing digital resilience, cyber risk and software quality and security through the lens of regulation, systemic exposure, and operational resilience rather than narrow tooling.
Cybersecurity tops the list of regulatory expectations for nearly all of respondents, ahead of digital identification and efforts to combat illicit financial flows.
Prevention, detection, and response systems
For QA and software testing teams, this signals a growing need to validate not only functional outcomes, but also the robustness of prevention, detection, and response systems under real-world conditions.
While roughly two thirds of institutions report fully operational prevention, detection, and response capabilities, the Barometer highlights a maturity gap that testing leaders will recognise immediately: investments have focused heavily on detection, but response and remediation capabilities remain limited.
The report frames the next challenge as a shift “from real-time identification to true resilience,” a transition that will require deeper testing of recovery processes, operational continuity, and cyber response readiness.
Alongside cybersecurity, digital transformation remains one of the dominant levers shaping strategy across the sector.
Executives cite customer experience and digital transformation among the leading priorities, reflecting a financial industry that is still modernising rapidly, but now with stronger discipline around execution and efficiency.
More than half of surveyed institutions now see themselves as digitally mature, with half considering themselves digitally mature, up six points from 2024.
Fintechs remain at the forefront, but insurers have made some of the most significant progress. For QA organisations, that maturity shift suggests broader adoption of modern testing practices, including automation, cyber testing, and AI-enabled monitoring, but also rising complexity as institutions scale digital services across markets.
Meteoric rise of AI
Artificial intelligence, meanwhile, is emerging less as an experimental technology and more as a risk management lever inside African financial services.
The Barometer reported that 77% of banks and financial institutions anticipate AI will have a strong or transformative impact on fraud detection, while 70% expect similar impact on credit risk analysis and process optimisation.
Executives also pointed to personalisation of offers and chatbots as leading use cases, combining operational efficiency with commercial expansion.
For QA and testing teams, this raises new governance questions. AI systems involved in fraud detection, credit scoring, and customer interaction require far more rigorous validation, monitoring, and model risk controls than traditional deterministic software. T
he report’s emphasis on “data quality and availability” as a remaining ecosystem challenge underlines that AI testing maturity will depend not only on tooling, but on the integrity of underlying data foundations.
Even as digital investment continues, executives are increasingly focused on fundamentals. In 2025, profitability emerged as a strategic priority for just under half of financial institutions surveyed, signalling what the report describes as a transition to maturity after years of sustained expansion.
That shift creates pressure for QA teams to demonstrate measurable value: testing that reduces outages, prevents cyber incidents, accelerates safe release cycles, and supports compliance becomes directly tied to financial performance.
Frédéric Maury, deputy CEO event at Jeune Afrique Media Group, describes this recalibration as a “return to fundamentals,” arguing that “executives are refocusing their priorities on financial performance and operational efficiency, which are once again becoming the sector’s true strategic compass.”
Continental interoperability is also accelerating, though it is not the lead story. PAPSS stands out as the most operational integration initiative, with 35% of institutions rating it as highly operational and citing gains in cost reduction and faster settlement times for intra-African payments.
For QA organisations, interoperability at this scale introduces major testing demands: cross-border payment rails, settlement resilience, fraud controls, and systemic cyber readiness.
Taken together, the Deloitte and AFIS Barometer portrays a sector consolidating digital gains while confronting the realities of systemic cyber risk, AI-driven transformation, and operational complexity.
Depouilly concluded that “the ongoing consolidation is paving the way for stronger, more sustainable, and decidedly more inclusive growth.”
For QA and software testing teams across Africa’s banking ecosystem, the message is clear: resilience is no longer an abstract ambition. It is becoming the measurable standard by which digital transformation will succeed or fail.
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