Cross-border growth needs local operational resilience

Connect the growth case to delivery

The Financial Stability Board's Regional Consultative Group for Sub-Saharan Africa met in Mauritius on 16 and 17 July. Its agenda included cross-border payments, stablecoin arrangements, regional vulnerabilities and the financial effects of extreme weather. These discussions highlight the range of dependencies that can affect financial services across borders. The meeting announcement does not itself create new requirements for firms. FSB regional meeting announcement (opens in a new tab)

For leadership teams planning expansion, the operational question is whether the proposed service can be delivered reliably in the market concerned. A compelling customer proposition still needs workable payment arrangements, accessible support and a credible response when a critical dependency becomes unavailable.

That assessment belongs in the investment case. It should identify the cost of delivering the promised service, the capacity needed to support it and the limitations that management is prepared to accept. Leaving these questions until after launch can turn predictable implementation work into urgent remediation.

The same discipline applies to a financial institution entering a market, a fintech extending a product and an advisory or software business serving regulated clients. Their obligations and exposures differ, but each needs to understand the operating commitments it is making.

Assess each market individually

A common group framework can support expansion into all three markets, provided that local requirements and operating conditions are assessed explicitly. Each country should have a documented view of the entities and activities involved, the customers served and the dependencies on which delivery relies.

Obtain appropriate local advice on the permissions, data handling, outsourcing and contractual arrangements relevant to the proposed service. Record the conclusions alongside the operating design so that the implementation team can act on them. A group policy should make room for necessary local differences without leaving their interpretation to individual staff.

The service design should also establish who can resolve a problem locally. If a customer needs urgent help, a contractual escalation to a distant head office may offer little practical reassurance. Define the authority available to local teams and the situations that require group involvement.

Avoid making broad assumptions about a country's reliability from regional headlines. Assess the providers, locations and service arrangements the business will actually use. The relevant evidence is specific to the operating model and should be refreshed when that model changes.

Examine common points of failure

Geographical expansion can increase exposure to the same underlying provider. Three country operations may use one identity service, one hosting platform or one specialist processing team. Their customers are distributed, but a shared dependency may still interrupt all three services together.

Map those connections before treating geographical spread as a resilience benefit. Include the information and access needed to recover a service. An alternative provider may be unable to help if the firm cannot retrieve its records or authenticate the staff authorised to use them.

Consider a hypothetical business serving clients in Nairobi, Lagos and Johannesburg through a central platform. If the platform's identity provider becomes unavailable, the immediate challenge could extend across every market. The response needs to identify essential activities, available alternatives and the decisions that local teams can make while the central service is restored.

Test the alternatives at a realistic volume. A manual workaround may support a handful of urgent cases but be unsuitable for a prolonged interruption. Establish what service can continue, which customers would be prioritised and how any accumulating backlog would be managed.

The result should influence commercial commitments. Recovery promises, support hours and implementation times should reflect arrangements the business can demonstrate. Clear limits are easier to manage before a contract is signed than during a difficult customer conversation.

Make expansion conditional on practical evidence

Before entering a new market, ask the delivery team to demonstrate the proposed service from onboarding through support and recovery. Include local partners and relevant suppliers in that exercise. The purpose is to establish whether the separate parts of the operating model work together.

Set specific criteria for launch and for subsequent growth. These might include successful processing of representative transactions, access to required records, usable escalation routes and an exercised response to a material service interruption. The criteria should fit the business and the obligations identified for that market.

Where a gap remains, the executive committee should understand its customer impact, the proposed temporary arrangements and the cost and timing of resolution. That makes the decision to proceed, limit the initial service or delay expansion explicit. It also gives the team a practical basis for planning delivery.

After launch, compare actual performance with the assumptions in the investment case. Review supplier responsiveness, unresolved service failures and the effort required to support customers. Use that evidence when deciding whether to expand the product range or increase volume.

Leadership should ask whether each market has a workable operating model, whether shared dependencies are understood and whether the service promise can be met during disruption. Growth becomes more predictable when those questions are answered before the business takes on commitments it cannot yet support consistently.