This report highlights the crucial role of banks in driving intra-African trade, facilitating capital flows, and deepening economic integration across the continent. The study unpacks systemic and banking-specific challenges such as regulatory fragmentation, currency volatility, limited correspondent banking networks, infrastructure deficits, and stringent compliance requirements. These barriers increase the cost and risk of cross-border operations. However, within these challenges lie significant opportunities for banks that move early and strategically, particularly in trade finance, structured lending, digital payments, and SME-focused financial solutions.

The small, micro and medium enterprises have become a national focus area in South Africa, with many state and private institutions wanting to understand this complex ecosystem. Access to finance has been a popular narrative for the lack of growth of this sector, but it has many friction points that all contribute to the current state of SME development.

With both a health crisis and a mobility crisis, caused by the restrictions of a National State of Disaster, the financial sector adapted their contingency plans for a financial crisis, to place the customer at the centre while rapidly shifting to a work from home environment for everyone, never anticipated by a highly regulated and conservative sector. This research covers the impact of Covid-19 on the financial sector in South Africa.

The most popular method of measuring competition in banking is the Herfindahl-Hirshman index that measures concentration as a proxy for competition. We examine 17 different mathematical models used to measure competition and begin framing the challenges that need to be considered to ensure that policy decisions, driven by competition concerns, will have the greatest positive impact on social welfare.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Competitiveness Report (GCR) is an annual report designed to assess competitiveness pillars of economies around the world, with the aim of influencing policy decisions and economic development strategy for …

The World Economic Forum published its report “The future of Financial Services: How disruptive innovations are reshaping the way financial services are structured, provisioned and consumed” and within this global context, we wanted to examine how the South African banking sector was…

The absence of common legal documentation, to underpin standard economic transactions, is frustrating the development of a vibrant financial market in the SADC region. International best practice provides a measure of…