Brian has almost 20 years of experience in transactional banking and financial services across South Africa and beyond. A computer science graduate, he has spent his career building a rare combination of deep technical knowledge and a strong understanding of how banking works for customers. We sat down with Brian to discuss what transactional banking looks like today.
I completed an Honours degree in computer science and from there I went into a business focusing on open-source development. A project came up for one of the South African banks who were building a new banking system and that became my first real foray into the banking world. It was something new at the time, so it was an exciting avenue to go down.
One project turned into another and another, as financial services continued to evolve and modernise. At all the companies I’ve worked for, I’ve always maintained that financial services common thread — it hasn’t always been pure banking, but transactional banking has been the constant. As I’ve progressed, I’ve moved from building the programming that underpins these systems, to understanding the functional side, to understanding the business logic and finally seeing it from a consumer perspective — knowing what is expected from a bank and then seeing how a bank actually makes that happen.
I’ve been at Bancon for just over two years, but I’d worked with many of the team for much longer than that through previous companies and projects, which was one of the biggest draws to joining Bancon.
Fundamentally, it is still debits and credits, that hasn’t changed. But transactional banking has become an embedded enabler in people’s lives. Growing up, going to the supermarket was a monthly event. Nowadays it’s multiple times a week. The basics of money in money out still apply, but how that money can move has changed completely. Online transactions, in-store card payments, tap-to-pay, virtual cards — the channels and avenues available to customers have multiplied.
The other fundamental change is availability. Banks used to open at nine and close at four. If you needed something outside of those hours, you came back the next day. Now it’s 24/7, every day of the year. That shift from business-hours banking to always-on banking is as significant as any of the technology changes.
I think there’s still an expectation that customers will simply stay with the bank they first opened an account with. Banks need to prove their value to customers in their everyday life to keep that relationship because switching has never been easier. The processes often reflect this. For example, opening an account is effortless, but closing one is considerably more difficult. Some of that is understandable as banks put enormous focus on acquiring customers and keeping them happy, so the exit process doesn’t always get the same attention.
The main expectation customers have is simple: access to funds and use of facilities at any time of day or night. Banks have improved enormously on this, but there are still gaps. There’s a tension between frictionless access and fraud prevention. If you’re transacting at 2am when you never normally do, a bank flagging that as unusual activity is protecting you. Most customers will accept a quick “Was this you?” but won’t accept being told to come back tomorrow. It’s a difficult balance for banks to manage. Flag it incorrectly and you’ve frustrated a customer. Miss it and you’ve let fraud through. Getting that balance right consistently is one of the harder challenges in transactional banking.
It has opened the door but isn’t a finished process. You can now access banking services from non-financial institutions in ways that simply weren’t possible before. It’s created real space for challengers to come in, offer competitive services, and attract customers away from the bigger banks.
The incumbents have also learned though. They’ve taken what challengers have demonstrated and asked themselves: Could we do that faster? Could we do it better? And in some cases, the answer is yes because they have the infrastructure, the balance sheet, and the regulatory credibility that challengers still must build.
The interesting thing will be to see how this plays out in the long term. If an incumbent can take a lesson from a challenger and embed it into their own infrastructure at scale, they can potentially close the gap or overturn it.
I’d start with the ecosystem. A current account isn’t just a place to put money anymore, now the focus is what that account enables for the customer. What opportunities does it create for them? What benefits does it bring beyond payments?
Technology moves too fast for a five-year-old proposition to feel relevant. Customers are comparing their banking experience to the likes of Spotify, Amazon, and other digital services they use daily. If those services can offer seamless, personalised, always-improving experiences, customers are going to ask why their bank can’t. Rewards, partnerships and proactive features are expected as standard and need to be right for the specific customer base.
Absolutely not. And the last few years have made that clearer than ever, especially with the advent of AI. The volume and sophistication of data breaches we’re seeing globally, the identity theft that follows, and the ability to generate convincing phone calls and videos that impersonate banks or individuals has seen the threat landscape change in ways that demand a fundamentally different approach.
If you treat compliance and fraud prevention as just a cost to be managed, you’re not prioritising them — you are just bolting them on at the end. It has to be a core part of how a banking proposition is designed from the ground up, otherwise the effectiveness and thus the safety of your systems will be compromised from the start.
The answer to that depends on who you are asking and which customers you are building for. If you look at the South African market, two new banks have taken different approaches to their customer propositions:
Discovery Bank built on the ecosystem they had established through Discovery Health and implemented their behavourial banking approach to build financial wellness for their customers and bring high levels of innovation to the market.
Capitec Bank focused on smaller customers with much simpler offerings in the market but used the base that was built on to become one of the biggest banks in the country.
The approaches by these two banks were different to start with, and each attracted their own set of customers, but both are considered successful and as such ‘got it right’. However, the key thing here is that they attracted different customer bases, showing that there is not always a simple right or wrong answer to market expectations. Similarly, if you took a wealth-focused bank, their customers’ needs may not be served by either of Capitec or Discovery’s offerings.
Ultimately, what getting it right means is: you’ve enabled your customers to have a better experience than they had before, and that experience is tailored to what your target customers actually want. Customer A and Customer B might overlap on some things and diverge completely on others. What works for one won’t work for the other. So you need to know your target market, understand what matters to them and build from there, rather than trying to build everything for everyone.
I’d point to the mix of people and the depth of experience. If you look at the team, there are people who have worked (and still do) across different geographies, different institutions, different aspects of major projects; some on the technical capabilities, some on the functional design, some on the business side. Combined, that gives a breadth of banking knowledge that’s difficult to match.
It’s not about being the biggest or the flashiest; it’s about bringing hard-earned perspective to the conversations that matter. We’ve seen what works and what doesn’t in real implementations, not just in theory. When we sit down with a client, we’re not telling them we know best, we’re saying: here’s what we’ve seen, here are the trade-offs, here are the options. Our job is to help them get to the right outcome for their situation and unique set of circumstances.
There’s a lot to learn here. You’re working alongside people who have decades of combined experience across some complex banking environments, and the financial services space is changing faster now than it ever has. AI, real-time everything, the ongoing evolution of open banking, there’s no shortage of interesting problems to work on.
But the thing I’d highlight most is the culture. It’s really a team, not just a group of people doing their jobs from eight to five. People care about the work, about the influence they have and about what they leave behind. We’re not interested in turning up, doing the minimum and moving on. We want clients to be in a better place after working with us than before. If that sounds like the environment you want to work in, Bancon is seriously worth a look.
Find out more about the new expectations of transactional banking.
Brian has almost 20 years of experience in transactional banking and financial services across South Africa and beyond. A computer science graduate, he has spent his career building a rare combination of deep technical knowledge and a strong understanding of how banking works for customers. We sat down with Brian to discuss what transactional banking looks like today.
I completed an Honours degree in computer science and from there I went into a business focusing on open-source development. A project came up for one of the South African banks who were building a new banking system and that became my first real foray into the banking world. It was something new at the time, so it was an exciting avenue to go down.
One project turned into another and another, as financial services continued to evolve and modernise. At all the companies I’ve worked for, I’ve always maintained that financial services common thread — it hasn’t always been pure banking, but transactional banking has been the constant. As I’ve progressed, I’ve moved from building the programming that underpins these systems, to understanding the functional side, to understanding the business logic and finally seeing it from a consumer perspective — knowing what is expected from a bank and then seeing how a bank actually makes that happen.
I’ve been at Bancon for just over two years, but I’d worked with many of the team for much longer than that through previous companies and projects, which was one of the biggest draws to joining Bancon.
Fundamentally, it is still debits and credits, that hasn’t changed. But transactional banking has become an embedded enabler in people’s lives. Growing up, going to the supermarket was a monthly event. Nowadays it’s multiple times a week. The basics of money in money out still apply, but how that money can move has changed completely. Online transactions, in-store card payments, tap-to-pay, virtual cards — the channels and avenues available to customers have multiplied.
The other fundamental change is availability. Banks used to open at nine and close at four. If you needed something outside of those hours, you came back the next day. Now it’s 24/7, every day of the year. That shift from business-hours banking to always-on banking is as significant as any of the technology changes.
I think there’s still an expectation that customers will simply stay with the bank they first opened an account with. Banks need to prove their value to customers in their everyday life to keep that relationship because switching has never been easier. The processes often reflect this. For example, opening an account is effortless, but closing one is considerably more difficult. Some of that is understandable as banks put enormous focus on acquiring customers and keeping them happy, so the exit process doesn’t always get the same attention.
The main expectation customers have is simple: access to funds and use of facilities at any time of day or night. Banks have improved enormously on this, but there are still gaps. There’s a tension between frictionless access and fraud prevention. If you’re transacting at 2am when you never normally do, a bank flagging that as unusual activity is protecting you. Most customers will accept a quick “Was this you?” but won’t accept being told to come back tomorrow. It’s a difficult balance for banks to manage. Flag it incorrectly and you’ve frustrated a customer. Miss it and you’ve let fraud through. Getting that balance right consistently is one of the harder challenges in transactional banking.
It has opened the door but isn’t a finished process. You can now access banking services from non-financial institutions in ways that simply weren’t possible before. It’s created real space for challengers to come in, offer competitive services, and attract customers away from the bigger banks.
The incumbents have also learned though. They’ve taken what challengers have demonstrated and asked themselves: Could we do that faster? Could we do it better? And in some cases, the answer is yes because they have the infrastructure, the balance sheet, and the regulatory credibility that challengers still must build.
The interesting thing will be to see how this plays out in the long term. If an incumbent can take a lesson from a challenger and embed it into their own infrastructure at scale, they can potentially close the gap or overturn it.
I’d start with the ecosystem. A current account isn’t just a place to put money anymore, now the focus is what that account enables for the customer. What opportunities does it create for them? What benefits does it bring beyond payments?
Technology moves too fast for a five-year-old proposition to feel relevant. Customers are comparing their banking experience to the likes of Spotify, Amazon, and other digital services they use daily. If those services can offer seamless, personalised, always-improving experiences, customers are going to ask why their bank can’t. Rewards, partnerships and proactive features are expected as standard and need to be right for the specific customer base.
Absolutely not. And the last few years have made that clearer than ever, especially with the advent of AI. The volume and sophistication of data breaches we’re seeing globally, the identity theft that follows, and the ability to generate convincing phone calls and videos that impersonate banks or individuals has seen the threat landscape change in ways that demand a fundamentally different approach.
If you treat compliance and fraud prevention as just a cost to be managed, you’re not prioritising them — you are just bolting them on at the end. It has to be a core part of how a banking proposition is designed from the ground up, otherwise the effectiveness and thus the safety of your systems will be compromised from the start.
The answer to that depends on who you are asking and which customers you are building for. If you look at the South African market, two new banks have taken different approaches to their customer propositions:
Discovery Bank built on the ecosystem they had established through Discovery Health and implemented their behavourial banking approach to build financial wellness for their customers and bring high levels of innovation to the market.
Capitec Bank focused on smaller customers with much simpler offerings in the market but used the base that was built on to become one of the biggest banks in the country.
The approaches by these two banks were different to start with, and each attracted their own set of customers, but both are considered successful and as such ‘got it right’. However, the key thing here is that they attracted different customer bases, showing that there is not always a simple right or wrong answer to market expectations. Similarly, if you took a wealth-focused bank, their customers’ needs may not be served by either of Capitec or Discovery’s offerings.
Ultimately, what getting it right means is: you’ve enabled your customers to have a better experience than they had before, and that experience is tailored to what your target customers actually want. Customer A and Customer B might overlap on some things and diverge completely on others. What works for one won’t work for the other. So you need to know your target market, understand what matters to them and build from there, rather than trying to build everything for everyone.
I’d point to the mix of people and the depth of experience. If you look at the team, there are people who have worked (and still do) across different geographies, different institutions, different aspects of major projects; some on the technical capabilities, some on the functional design, some on the business side. Combined, that gives a breadth of banking knowledge that’s difficult to match.
It’s not about being the biggest or the flashiest; it’s about bringing hard-earned perspective to the conversations that matter. We’ve seen what works and what doesn’t in real implementations, not just in theory. When we sit down with a client, we’re not telling them we know best, we’re saying: here’s what we’ve seen, here are the trade-offs, here are the options. Our job is to help them get to the right outcome for their situation and unique set of circumstances.
There’s a lot to learn here. You’re working alongside people who have decades of combined experience across some complex banking environments, and the financial services space is changing faster now than it ever has. AI, real-time everything, the ongoing evolution of open banking, there’s no shortage of interesting problems to work on.
But the thing I’d highlight most is the culture. It’s really a team, not just a group of people doing their jobs from eight to five. People care about the work, about the influence they have and about what they leave behind. We’re not interested in turning up, doing the minimum and moving on. We want clients to be in a better place after working with us than before. If that sounds like the environment you want to work in, Bancon is seriously worth a look.
Find out more about the new expectations of transactional banking.
