Absa’s giant steps to rebuild its integration foundation

With headquarters in Johannesburg, South Africa, Absa also operates in many other African countries, with international offices in Europe and the US. Running an organization across several markets has its unique complexities, especially in the integration layer, because each region has its own systems, business processes, regulatory requirements and data standards.

For Absa, replacing an integration layer that had reached breaking point was a fundamental shift in its banking philosophy. It wasn’t just a technical project. Duplication was rampant, complexity was baked in, and reusability was non-existent. Every change had far-reaching ripple effects, and each new channel had to be built from scratch. As it stood, making the improvements the business demanded at the speed required to remain competitive was impossible.

According to Tamu Dutuma, Absa’s head of technology strategy for Africa Regions, this integration layer had been in place for close to a decade. While it played an important role in enabling business in the past, it was too difficult to maintain and no longer aligned to current standards and ways of working.

Integration standardization

Absa evaluated a range of available solutions in the market, but given the complexity of integrating with legacy systems across a multi-country financial environment, the team decided a more tailored approach was required.

“It was critical to establish the right architecture from the outset, which is why we worked with a strategic partner to build a solution that could better meet our specific integration needs, while also creating a stronger foundation for future scalability,” says Dutuma.

Balancing the long-term benefits of standardization against the immediate complexity of making the shift meant taking time to understand the upstream and downstream impact. The team had to be realistic about how they would standardize banking services, systems, and integrations while keeping disruption to a minimum.

As part of this process, Absa aligned with globally recognized standards, including BIAN, which provides a common framework for designing and integrating banking systems. The goal is to give banks a blueprint to successfully modernize complicated legacy architectures by defining standardized business capabilities, service domains, APIs, and data models.

The new integration layer provided three critical things for the business: decoupling and abstraction, standardization, and strategic orchestration. This meant separating customer-facing channels from core banking and backend services, using BIAN frameworks to enforce strict governance, and orchestrating only where necessary to keep the architecture lean.

Choosing the right implementation strategy

With this plan in mind, the bank needed to decide how to execute it. “We took a phased approach to the rollout, starting with a specific use case, our chatbot Chat Banking in our Africa Regions business,” says Dutuma. “This allowed us to build and test the new integration layer in a controlled, practical way. From there, we introduced an architecture principle that all new initiatives would integrate through this platform, while only time-critical projects continued to rely on the legacy environment.” The goal was to set a North Star project, which allowed them to quickly demonstrate value.

But this wasn’t a copy-paste exercise, and everything didn’t fit perfectly from the start. The bank admits that managing legacy outliers remains one of the biggest challenges on this modernization journey. Data mapping was another challenge. To ensure data moved correctly and quickly from one system to another, Absa had to build a data mapping framework to automate parts of the process.

As the project progressed and the team ironed out these kinks, they gradually migrated existing services to the new layer. “This wasn’t a like-for-like replacement,” he says. “We were also simplifying and standardizing the architecture, which required careful mapping, redesign, and end-to-end testing across both channels and core systems.”

Banking on the future

For Dutuma, this multi-year journey has allowed Absa to incrementally modernize the environment while continuing to support ongoing business delivery. And the project has delivered several strategic wins, from a drastic reduction in time-to-market to an equally dramatic reduction in costs. Standardization also opened additional opportunities for innovation across the business. For example, using a standardized API catalog enables plug-and-play integration capabilities, which means developers aren’t reinventing the wheel for every project. Where there used to be 20 disparate payment services, for instance, because everything is standardized, there are now four, which markedly reduces maintenance costs.

 “This also provides a stronger foundation for Absa Group’s open banking initiatives, enabling selected services to be securely exposed for integration with FinTech partners and other ecosystem players,” he says. Plus, integrating new channels has become more straightforward, as teams can now leverage consistent, reusable integration patterns. This makes it easier to scale digital capabilities and accelerate delivering new customer-facing solutions.

This project, according to Dutuma, wasn’t just about fixing the old tech, but enabling cloud readiness and creating a leaner, modular application stack that can be used across other markets. Now, Absa doesn’t need to build a unique integration for a wallet in Botswana or for internet banking in Tanzania. There’s a common middleware layer across all regions, allowing countries to independently replace or upgrade core applications without affecting the broader regional footprint. In this way, Absa has essentially dissociated geography from technology to reduce complexity, improve interoperability, and ensure that different systems all speak the same language.