Meet the CIO | Absa CITO Johnson Idesoh on AI, cyber and the future of banking
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Johnson Idesoh, group chief information and technology officer at Absa, says AI in all its forms – generative, agentic and the AI now being wielded by cybercriminals – is the single biggest topic on his desk, but cautions that it remains a tool that has to be tied directly to business strategy and customer outcomes to deliver value.
Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Idesoh said AI is maturing rapidly into heavily regulated industries such as financial services, and that banks must use the same technology to counter adversaries who are themselves deploying it.
Idesoh has held senior technology leadership roles across several large organisations, including group CIO at Old Mutual and leadership positions at insurer Aviva and pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca, before joining Absa as group CTO.
In the interview, Idesoh unpacks the thinking behind Absa's R2.4-billion software impairment in its 2025 financial year – a 13-fold increase on the prior year's write-off – explaining that it was driven not by a single large asset but by more than 100 smaller ones, and reflected three things:
• A fundamental shift in group strategy under new group CEO Kenny Fihla towards a Pan-African, client-led model;
• A changing regulatory regime; and
• The accelerating pace of technological change in AI, data and cybersecurity.
He also reflects on how banking technology has evolved – from the water-cooled mainframes of the 1990s to today’s far smaller IBM z16 machines and the move towards cloud and service-based consumption – and why the real challenge is not the mainframe itself but the decades-old Cobol software paradigms still running on it.
Listen to the interview
Idesoh also discusses:
• The noise around Anthropic’s “Mythos” model and what AI-driven vulnerability discovery means for bank cybersecurity, arguing that organisations should not panic but must become adept at using AI to find and remediate vulnerabilities at speed;
• Whether such models should be released to the public immediately or to large institutions first; the impact of AI on software development jobs, and his view that the traditional junior-to-senior developer pyramid may give way to apprenticeship-style models;
• How Absa is encouraging its technology talent to keep pace through leadership, early-adopter advocates and gamified celebration of new skills;
• The bank’s deployment of agentic AI, including its customer-facing AI agent and an internal IT-support agent that has handled queries from 11 000 colleagues with a 90% resolution rate; and
• His own path into technology, from an aspiring airline pilot who realised aircraft were becoming “flying computers” to a career that began on a BBC Micro.
Don’t miss any of the other great interviews on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO.
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Johnson Idesoh, group chief information and technology officer at Absa, says AI in all its forms – generative, agentic and the AI now being wielded by cybercriminals – is the single biggest topic on his desk, but cautions that it remains a tool that has to be tied directly to business strategy and customer outcomes to deliver value.
Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Idesoh said AI is maturing rapidly into heavily regulated industries such as financial services, and that banks must use the same technology to counter adversaries who are themselves deploying it.
Idesoh has held senior technology leadership roles across several large organisations, including group CIO at Old Mutual and leadership positions at insurer Aviva and pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca, before joining Absa as group CTO.
In the interview, Idesoh unpacks the thinking behind Absa's R2.4-billion software impairment in its 2025 financial year – a 13-fold increase on the prior year's write-off – explaining that it was driven not by a single large asset but by more than 100 smaller ones, and reflected three things:
• A fundamental shift in group strategy under new group CEO Kenny Fihla towards a Pan-African, client-led model;
• A changing regulatory regime; and
• The accelerating pace of technological change in AI, data and cybersecurity.
He also reflects on how banking technology has evolved – from the water-cooled mainframes of the 1990s to today’s far smaller IBM z16 machines and the move towards cloud and service-based consumption – and why the real challenge is not the mainframe itself but the decades-old Cobol software paradigms still running on it.
Listen to the interview
Idesoh also discusses:
• The noise around Anthropic’s “Mythos” model and what AI-driven vulnerability discovery means for bank cybersecurity, arguing that organisations should not panic but must become adept at using AI to find and remediate vulnerabilities at speed;
• Whether such models should be released to the public immediately or to large institutions first; the impact of AI on software development jobs, and his view that the traditional junior-to-senior developer pyramid may give way to apprenticeship-style models;
• How Absa is encouraging its technology talent to keep pace through leadership, early-adopter advocates and gamified celebration of new skills;
• The bank’s deployment of agentic AI, including its customer-facing AI agent and an internal IT-support agent that has handled queries from 11 000 colleagues with a 90% resolution rate; and
• His own path into technology, from an aspiring airline pilot who realised aircraft were becoming “flying computers” to a career that began on a BBC Micro.
Don’t miss any of the other great interviews on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO.
