Corporate culture hack: The tech revolution that’s transforming Absa

You may have heard of a Hackathon. But you’ve probably never heard of Absa’s 2016 Technology Hackathon. It is essentially an internal challenge in which 40 teams, comprised of Absa employees from around the country, get together to identify business problems within the company, conceptualise tech-based solutions and then code working prototypes to address them – all within 24 hours. Although the event saw its fair share of media coverage and some of the biggest tech companies in the world had a vested interest in the goings-on at the gathering, it was not the kind of glamorous soirée that generates the big headlines. Nevertheless, the hackathon represented a fascinating milestone on the little-known journey of technology transformation that began 18 months ago at Absa.

I met with Barclays Africa Group’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Peter Rix, to chat about the hackathon and how it contributes to Absa’s shift towards technology and innovation-based banking. Sprawled out on multi-coloured bean bags in the chill room of the hackathon, the tale that unfolded was far grander in scope and scale than I would have imagined – it is a story of transformation, from a corporation in flux to a thriving hub of innovation at the cutting edge of the banking world.

Change of tide

2014 was a challenging time for the technology team within Absa. Rife with the perception of disengaged employees, attracting the right talent to the bank to break the cycle was difficult. The corporate culture just wasn’t clicking and morale was low. Recognising that they were at a crossroad, the Group’s senior leadership realised that urgent action was required: something had to change and their priority was to define a new strategy and bring in the right talent.

Over the past 18 months, the Technology management team have been implementing a transformational approach that’s enabled them to go back to the basics and build the future of banking from the ground up. The vision was to adopt an engineering strategy and discipline similar to a technology company, which enables speed, agility, and innovation. This strategy would ensure that the bank remained relevant and was well positioned to serve customers.

Peter Rix described the myriad problems that existed within the business, as ‘fires’, and in order to take Absa forward, they had to first contain the fires. With Ashley Veasey brought in as the Group Chief Information Officer (CIO) to lead the bank towards this new way of working, Peter and the rest of the Technology leadership team set about fighting the fires. They soon began to see their efforts rewarded. The culture and staff morale was beginning to change. The team quickly established a reputation for redefining boundaries and clearing bottlenecks – blazing a trail for other teams and projects to follow.

The turning point

“The real turning point for me was the first hackathon we ran in May last year,” Peter stated.  “It represented a moment in which we had finally achieved sufficient stability in the business, that – instead of all our top talent being wasted on fighting fires – we finally had the capacity to focus on the cool stuff.”

The 2015 hackathon was a resounding success, with 100 people in 20 teams designing and building some amazing tech solutions that included:

• A virtual credit card – enabling customers to use their credit facility in a secure manner, even if they don’t have the physical card on their person.
• An innovative app for children that allows parents to allocate lists of chores/tasks, which can then be rewarded with micropayments through the app, thus teaching kids good financial principles from childhood.
• A credit card ‘stop’ button for one’s smartphone, which allows customers to stop a card with a single click if a card is stolen, or if they notice fraudulent transactions.

“Amazon even came in and allocated us free capacity and resources, which saw us building infrastructure that would usually take six months to set up, in the space of 15 minutes. We built the first prototype of an online retail portal, which everyone said couldn’t be done, in about 40 minutes!” Peter recalled excitedly. “It was a real ‘aha!’ moment, in which we realised that our world had transformed.”

With this revelation and the new-found stability in place, Peter and the team could focus on moving Absa forward and pushing the envelope in terms of technology and innovation. They adopted a new attitude: to act like a technology company, not a bank. Instead of seeing the other banks as their main competitors, Absa was looking to compete with the Googles and Amazons of the world, and it started to show in the way in which they were regularly introducing disruptive, rather than incremental innovations to the banking space.

“We’re moving towards automation,” Peter said, “DevOps is a good example. It’s essentially automated software that minimises human error through self-built environments. We recently decided to test it out by building a recon environment – which would normally take about six months – in about six minutes in Amazon Cloud. It’s all about building agile, responsive processes and the quick implementation of new software and solutions.”

The excitement in Peter’s voice was palpable as he detailed Absa’s new projects. They’re eagerly taking on highly ambitious challenges and the end goal isn’t always to get as many people as possible to sign up and use their new tech and platforms, but rather to stimulate a culture of success by proving that they can do it – identifying a target and reaching it, quickly and successfully. With their exciting new direction and internal culture, Absa has become a place where technologists want to work. And as they attract key people, whilst instilling a strong sense of self-belief in their employees, they are able to divide and conquer and achieve what many believe to be impossible. This year alone API integration, ChatBanking (banking through Twitter and Facebook Messenger – the latter a world first), the new banking app and website, fingerprint and other biometric identification, and of course, this year’s hackathon, have all successfully gone live. Everything is coming together.

The hackathon itself saw a massive uptake from last year. The first event only had about 100 participants, whereas this year’s event saw up to 400 people wanting to take part. Unfortunately, this had to be whittled down to 200, but it’s clear that there’s a strong desire from everyone within Absa to get involved in exciting new projects and be part of something great.

“It starts from the top down. The Bank’s leadership is on board and they nurture, encourage and tell us to ‘do the right thing’, which is key to the agile approach,” Peter said.

When I asked Peter about his vision for the growth of initiatives like the hackathon, he didn’t hesitate in detailing an ambitious dream for the future.

“Shared Growth is the vehicle through which we want to advance events like this. My goal is to collaborate with the other banks and organise a ‘HackAfrica’ event: hire out Nasrec and break the world record for the biggest hackathon ever.”

Shared Growth represents a vision for Africa, which will see the big banks working together to develop skills on the continent, particularly in the technology space. Peter described the concept of Shared Growth as 'we prosper when society prospers', which would see a departure from the fierce interbank competition in an effort to achieve the selfless goal of turning Africa into a global player in the technology market. Where we have traditionally had to outsource technological capabilities to India and China, we would aim to look internally instead, developing Africans to develop Africa.

“I’m a huge proponent of collocation,” Peter says, “which involves renting out server space, equipment, bandwidth and other digital resources to other parties. We’ve simply never had the skill or scale to do it here. There just aren’t enough local developers to handle the larger builds, so instead of it being a price issue it’s an issue of availability, we have to outsource to India or China simply because of skill and scale. This in itself isn’t ideal, as working with teams on other continents means we are less responsive and agile. We have to deal with the language barrier and if the spec for a build is wrong it can mean huge, costly mistakes, which are much harder to fix. Not to mention the fact that we are outsourcing jobs and resources which could have been allocated locally.”

To this end, Absa is making strides towards developing skills locally with a number of graduate, intern and industry programmes aimed at uplifting the local workforce. Internally, they are adopting various policies to upskill and enhance the working lives of their employees.

People as a priority

Peter excitedly told of a concept he is driving within the bank, TechMoola, which sees each employee within the technology team being given R2 000 to spend on a course of some kind, in whichever field they choose, even if it does not directly relate to their day-to-day work. By investing in people they not only increase the bank’s internal skill base, but they also give their employees the chance to improve themselves and pursue their passions. They are even planning to gamify TechMoola, by allowing employees to trade their ‘credits’ or earn more by achieving certain objectives.

Pokémon GO: corporate edition, anyone?

Keeping employees happy is something that needs to be approached holistically and Peter realises this. “I’m very excited about a concept that we in Technology are experimenting with. Through the use of data, we aim to learn all we can about our employees, what they like and what makes them tick, in order to cater to them as individuals. Google and Amazon are doing something similar.” Essentially, this is a method of personalised incentivisation that makes each employee feel they are being considered on an individual basis. So, if an employee receives a recognition award, for instance, and the bank knows that said employee is an avid football fan, they might receive tickets to the Orlando Pirates game or something similar. These are all simple, yet innovative methods of creating a corporate culture that attracts and retains the best people.

The business is also encouraging a complete mindset shift where failure is seen as an opportunity to move forward, faster – especially when experimenting with new technology solutions. It’s what the technology team refers to as a 'fail fast, learn fast' mantra.

“We started to have fail fast parties!” Peter laughed. “We wanted to teach people that failing wasn’t a bad thing, but if you fail, fail fast, don’t fail for two years. So for our fail fast parties, we would encourage employees to stand up and talk about something they tried and failed in, essentially encouraging shared learning. It’s all part of the transition to agile, responsive implementation of technology and solutions.”

Risky business

Seeing a pattern emerge in this story, I queried Peter about his view on risk and innovation and whether he felt there was a direct relationship between the two.

“Yes and no,” he responded. “Risk isn’t something we avoid and it’s an important part of innovation. However, with the automation of processes and procedures, we’re moving towards phasing out risk, on our end at least. As we automate, governance, compliance and legal requirements are coded into our systems, so that eventually we will push a button to launch something new and it will automatically be implemented, fully compliant, according to the criteria we choose.”

With safeguards being built into the systems and automation eliminating the risk of human error, mistakes are becoming obsolete; risk is playing less of a role in innovation.