From Mail&Guardian

Barclays Plc’s African unit is equipping tellers with iPads and offering customers mobile apps as the bank tries to win back market share by stepping up lending in the face of slowing growth in South Africa.

Barclays Africa Group is trying to regain clients after being overtaken as the country’s biggest mortgage lender by Standard Bank Group two years ago. It’s the only one of South Africa’s big four banking shares to decline this year and the company told analysts in a November 28 presentation that it wants to be investors’ “favourite” African bank stock by the end of 2015.

“It may not be the best time to be lending, but they couldn’t keep bleeding and losing customers,” said Patrice Rassou, head of equities at Sanlam Investment Management in Cape Town. “The key will be their credit scoring and if they can be strict enough that they don’t pick up a lot of bad debts.”

Upgrading technology
Barclays Africa chief executive Maria Ramos is spending R1.2-billion on refurbishing branches, installing cash machines and upgrading technology to recapture clients lost to FirstRand Ltd. and Nedbank Group Ltd. After tightening credit criteria for the past three years, Barclays Africa is determined to regain market share, said Craig Bond, the company’s head of retail and business banking.

The bank appointed Anil Hinduja as head of risk six weeks ago to address some of its shortcomings, Bond said. Hinduja was previously responsible for managing retail credit risk globally for Barclays and spent 19 years at Citigroup Inc.

“We were overly conservative in mortgage and vehicle lending,” Bond said in a phone interview on December 2. “The real crux was fixing the lending business.”

African operations contributed about 11% of London-based Barclays’s revenue last year. While cutting investment banking and European consumer and business banking jobs to reduce costs this year, the British bank increased its stake in the Johannesburg-based lender to 62.3% to tap growth in sub-Saharan Africa. Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins said in February that the bank planned to grow “significantly” in Africa.

Written by Renee Bonorchis | Read more at Mail&Guardian