“Can Africa's largest bank build a globally competitive consumer fintech product (Shyft) and a corporate API banking platform (OneHub) on top of its own balance sheet and infrastructure without ceding ground to challenger banks or third-party BaaS providers?”
Standard Bank is Africa's largest bank by assets, operating for over 160 years as a full-service financial institution. The Shyft product, launched around 2018, represents the group's consumer fintech pivot: a mobile-first global money app targeting South African retail customers for forex, international payments, multi-currency cards, and offshore investments — effectively a neobank-adjacent product built on the group's own banking rails and Currencycloud's FX infrastructure. The group simultaneously built OneHub, a B2B API marketplace for corporate banking, signalling an embedded-finance-provider ambition in addition to being a traditional bank.