Can Banks and Telcos Partner to Improve Society?

In this Standard Bank One Hub Series conversation, Jonathan Lamb of Standard Bank's CIB Digital Team and Andy Wilson, who builds Vodacom Business's Enterprise go-to-market within Vodacom's Ventures and Partnerships team, explain how a bank and a telco ended up co-building a product for blue-collar workers, a problem neither organisation set out to solve. The sharpest thing in the conversation is that this wasn't a data play or a distribution play between two competing financial ecosystems: it started as two organisations independently circling the same mining client until they realised the real issue on the table was frontline worker digital exclusion, not banking or telecoms at all.

What OneHub actually is: Standard Bank's marketplace for non-traditional products

OneHub is Standard Bank's digital solutions marketplace, built inside its Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) business by a relatively new unit called the CIB Digital Team. Jonathan Lamb described its purpose as twofold: sharpening the digital experience around the bank's existing corporate products, and partnering with clients on what he called "non-traditional, beyond traditional banking products." OneHub brings together Standard Bank's own financial products, new products in development, and outside partner capability, all accessible to clients and their in-house developers through APIs. Lamb said the bank has signed five partners so far, including Vodacom, the biometric identity platform Identifi, and a data partnership with Transaction Capital used to strengthen onboarding and credit decisions.

The mining client that surfaced the real problem: blue-collar digital exclusion

The partnership traces back to a mining sector client that Standard Bank and Vodacom had each been engaging separately, Standard Bank through CIB, Vodacom through its Innovation group and Ventures and Partnerships team. Lamb said the problem statement wasn't obvious at first: it only became concrete after a focused workshop with the client. What emerged was that the client's blue-collar, frontline workforce was digitally excluded compared with office-based staff, lacking any reliable channel for two-way communication or a sense of connection to the organisation. Wilson said COVID made this worse, since in-person management contact and town halls disappeared with no digital replacement for workers without email addresses or company devices. Once Standard Bank and Vodacom unpacked the problem together, they connected it to Vodacom's existing relationship with WiseTalk, an employee engagement app built specifically for this kind of frontline communication.

The solution: WiseTalk, Identifi and reverse-billed data

The joint offering combines three components. WiseTalk provides bi-directional communication between employer and employee, covering practical use cases like leave balances, shift schedules, and dependent records. Identifi provides a biometric security plugin for onboarding and ongoing digital engagement. Vodacom then wraps the connectivity: each mine worker in the initial rollout gets eight gigabytes of data a month, billed to the employer rather than the worker, what Wilson called a reverse-billing model that removes cost as a barrier to adoption. Wilson noted Vodacom doesn't profit on the hardware itself, treating the device as a pass-through to get workers onto the network, with the economics working because the employer is funding inclusion at scale across its workforce. Wilson also pointed to one soundbite from WiseTalk's own client base: employees at one company watched a CEO video message an average of eight times each, a signal of how starved for this kind of connection frontline workers had been.

Why two competitors partnered instead of building alone

Both executives were asked directly why Standard Bank and Vodacom didn't just build this themselves, or leave it to WiseTalk alone. Lamb's answer was that neither organisation is a seasoned employee engagement player, and forcing the full value chain in-house would have been slower and harder to execute than partnering with specialists already trusted in that space. Wilson framed it around Vodacom's own purpose, tying it to eight of the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals the company has committed to, including the seventeenth goal on partnership itself. He argued that Standard Bank and Vodacom each bring their own large ecosystems, and that joining those ecosystems to solve a shared client's problem beats either company trying to fly alone.

What's next for the OneHub Insider Conversations series

Lamb confirmed the WiseTalk and Identifi combination has been live for about a year and is intended as a template for further OneHub partnerships, not an exclusive arrangement with Vodacom. This was the first of a planned OneHub Insider Conversations series: the next session covers Standard Bank's Identifi partnership in detail, scheduled for the end of September, followed by a session on PowerPlus, a homegrown solution, in October. Wilson added that the roadmap with the mining client extends beyond communication into financial inclusion and even agriculture, on the logic that the same mobile phone used for work messaging can become a platform for education once it goes home with the worker.

Is the Standard Bank and Vodacom partnership exclusive?

No. Both Lamb and Wilson were explicit that the arrangement is non-exclusive. Standard Bank said OneHub is designed to onboard multiple partners, including competitors and other fintechs, and Vodacom described its own Ventures and Partnerships approach the same way. WiseTalk and Identifi are simply the first partners solving this specific blue-collar engagement problem through OneHub.

Who actually pays for the data these workers use?

The employer does. Under Vodacom's reverse-billing model, each mine worker's monthly data and airtime allocation is billed straight to the company, not the individual, which is why cost hasn't been a barrier to rolling the programme out at scale.

What compliance work was needed to share data between a bank and a telco?

Extensive due diligence, according to Lamb, because two large regulated organisations were onboarding each other for the first time rather than one contracting a smaller vendor. The teams mapped where every piece of data sits, whether it's personal or anonymised, and which consents apply, benchmarked against POPIA as the most stringent relevant standard. Wilson said the resulting contract took about three weeks to finalise.