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  The importance of accelerating digital enablement in the retail market By Hymie Marnewick, Managing Director of XLink and Celine Thungaveloo  Head of Sales at XLink A question that retailers are grappling with is where to focus their energy to drive sales: in brick-and-mortar stores or by investing in their online presence. “The simple answer is that the division between traditional retail and e-commerce needs to be reassessed,” explains Hymie Marnewick, Managing Director of XLink.   Changing consumer demands   With the catchphrase of the moment being “digital transformation”, it may be surprising to read that traditional retail still brought in a trillion-rand sum last year. However, the sector did see a decline of a little over  4%  from 2019. Conversely, South Africa’s online retail sector grew by an astonishing  66%  in 2020, more than doubling its share of total retail spend since 2018. This unprecedented growth can largely be attributed to...

Vodacom together with its subsidiary, XLink are modernising the African financial services world, utilising the best in platform technologies and design thinking.     As a leading provider of secure payment networks and services in South Africa, XLink has routed the payment traffic of SA's banks for nearly 20 years. XLink established a new network and platform that unifies its different business capabilities, delivering them as and when they are needed. XLink deploys new services within weeks, harnessing Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) to successfully deliver workloads for customers of all sizes.    "We consolidated our capabilities at XLink into a platform to deploy and scale our solutions more readily and engage with more of the markets across Africa," says Hymie Marnewick, Managing Director at XLink. "Vodacom completes this great value. They have the networking skills and managed services reach to take us where our customers need us. They are also an AWS Advanced ...