Nigerian banks like UBA are keen to keep USD-denominated costs low; it is the perfect opportunity for Huawei to make inroads into banking.
An inside joke in Nigerian banking is that any Chief Information Officer (CIO) who wants to keep their job must immediately get on the phone with technology giant IBM. Its an acknowledgment of how Nigerias biggest banks use IBMs products for storage and how its reliability has kept many CIOs in their jobs. Yet, an increased drive to cut USD-denominated costs at these banks may mean that CIOs are now calling other companies.
A push to cut costs at top banks is letting Chinese enterprise company Huawei make inroads with its storage and cloud solutions. Huawei sold storage solutions to Zenith Bank, a tier-1 Nigerian bank, in 2023, TechCabal exclusively reported in March, and did business with Fidelity, First Bank, and Opay.
Its latest major deal is with United Bank of Africa, a commercial bank with a market capitalisation of ?803 billion. Three people familiar with the matter said Huawei sold 200 petabytes of storage and cloud solutions to the United Bank for Africa (UBA) in a deal thought to be worth around $3 million.
Huawei declined to comment on any part of this story.
