Turning AI Into Business Value at Nedbank

Meet our customer

Nedbank is one of Africa’s largest financial services groups, providing retail and business banking, corporate and investment banking, insurance, and asset management services. Headquartered in Johannesburg and with a strong presence across Southern Africa, Nedbank serves more than eight million clients and has R1.6 trillion in total assets. With almost 26,000 permanent employees, the bank combines significant scale with a strong focus on digital innovation, operational efficiency, and delivering an outstanding client experience.

A Need to Free Up Capacity

As one of South Africa’s leading financial institutions, Nedbank continually looks for opportunities to improve efficiency, strengthen capability and accelerate delivery outcomes. Within its Business Analysis and Process Engineering communities, practitioners spend significant time documenting, maintaining and publishing process assets. While these activities are essential, they can reduce the time available for highervalue activities such as analysis, stakeholder engagement, process optimisation and value realisation.

At the same time, Nedbank recognized the growing importance of AIenabled ways of working and wanted to explore how AI could be used responsibly to enhance productivity without compromising quality or governance. The question was simple: How could it help practitioners spend less time creating artefacts and more time building mesaurable new business value?

Solving Business Problems from Day 1

Nedbank launched a pilot of ARIS AI Companion within a delivery environment led by Rionna Roni, Senior Manager, Business Analysis and Process Engineering, and Bradley Silber, Technical Lead, Juristic Digital Channels. Rather than treating AI as a technology experiment, the focus was on solving practical business challenges and improving the day-to-day experience of Business Analysts and Process Engineers.

The team used AI Companion to:

• Accelerate process documentation activities.
• Generate first drafts of process descriptions.
• Improve consistency of process artefacts.
• Reduce effort associated with process publishing and maintenance.
• Improve practitioner productivity.
• Create capacity for more strategic analysis and stakeholder engagement.

A key principle throughout the pilot was maintaining human oversight. AI-generated outputs were reviewed and validated by practitioners to ensure quality, accuracy and alignment to governance requirements.

From Awareness to Adoption

One of the most important lessons was that successful AI adoption is not primarily a technology challenge. The focus quickly shifted from: “What can AI do?” to “How can AI help us deliver better outcomes?”

The pilot created opportunities for practitioners to experiment in a safe environment while still maintaining accountability and quality standards. This helped teams move beyond curiosity and begin incorporating AI into their normal ways of working.

Impact So Far

The results from the pilot were encouraging as the Nedbank team achieved:

• 67% average reduction in process modelling effort
• Reduction from 1.5 hours to approximately 30 minutes for simpler process activities
• Reduction from 16.5 hours to approximately 5.5 hours for more complex process activities
• Improved consistency of process documentation
• Reduced manual effort associated with process maintenance and publishing
• Increased practitioner capacity to focus on analysis, stakeholder engagement and value creation

Beyond the measurable productivity gains, the pilot also demonstrated how AI can support capability development by helping practitioners work more effectively while maintaining governance and quality expectations.

Looking Ahead

The success of the pilot reinforced Nedbank’s belief that AI should be viewed as a capability accelerator rather than a replacement for skilled practitioners. The company’s focus remains on using technology responsibly to improve business outcomes, enhance practitioner effectiveness and create sustainable value.