We are living through a period of profound disruption and opportunity. While economic and social volatility continues to shape our markets, advances in AI and digital transformation redefine how individuals, organisations and industries operate. These technologies hold significant potential to address some of South Africa’s most pressing challenges, from productivity to inclusion.
Technology remains a cornerstone of Blu Label’s growth strategy. Our platforms, systems and operating models are continually reshaped to create a resilient, flexible business that is fit for the future. In FY25 and into the first quarter of FY2026, we have deepened our commitment to a modernised, cloud-based technology foundation that accelerates speed to market, simplifies operations for our subsidiaries, and enhances customer experiences.
Our progress has been tangible: over the past quarter, our systems’ availability averaged 99.998%, significantly ahead of our 99.8% target, with no priority one failures recorded across our network and infrastructure layers.
The successful rollout of BluSky, our next-generation cloud-native platform, marks a step-change in our digital transformation journey. BluSky is on track to replace the legacy Aeon system in this financial year. This modernisation has been underpinned by a “co-existence” strategy, which allows us to migrate product by product while minimising disruption to business‑as‑usual operations.
Key milestones include modernising our four core product capabilities – data, airtime, electricity and vouchers – and onboarding customers onto the platform. This progress reflects our platform’s robustness and the close collaboration between our technology teams and business partners. We also completed the rollout of our new finance enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, unlocking new efficiencies in process automation and data-driven decision‑making.
We continue to monitor our platforms against rigorous service-level agreements. Average uptime across May to July 2025 ranged between 99.995% and 100%, compared to 99.86% in the same period last year. This reliability has been bolstered by close partnerships with mobile network operators and electricity providers, with all major suppliers recording improved uptime performance.
As digital threats grow in volume and sophistication, we remain resolute in prioritising security. Implementing our SOC continues to deliver results, enabling proactive monitoring and incident response. We have also embedded “secure by design” principles into the BluSky build, ensuring critical vulnerabilities are addressed upfront.
We remain an ISO 27001:2022-certified organisation and are preparing for our year two surveillance audit in September 2025. The migration from Aeon to BluSky requires re-certification of the new environment, and we have already commissioned impact assessments, updated our ISMS and engaged with our accreditation partner to ensure a seamless transition.
Our commitment to continuous improvement was reinforced through recent internal and external audits, which rated our controls as largely adequate with suggested enhancements.
Innovation is guided by one principle: making life simpler and better for our customers. During the year we deployed several AI-driven solutions, including a WhatsApp bot to handle customer service queries, a sales virtual assistant for our customer relationship consultants, and a Developer AI experiment that halved delivery time on a sample project (16 days reduced to eight). These pilots improve efficiency and demonstrate how AI can be harnessed responsibly to scale capacity.
We also extended wallet and account management functionality for the informal market, and introduced new ticketing solutions built on microservices. These advancements highlight our focus on financial inclusion, convenience and scalability.
Looking ahead, FY2026 will be defined by the complete stabilisation of BluSky and the retirement of legacy platforms. This will enable greater automation, advanced analytics and simplified product launches for our partners.
Beyond FY2026, we will focus on embedding AI and machine learning across the Group, investing in cloud-native security and resilience, and continuing to grow our digital ecosystem. Equally important is investing in our people – from senior technical talent to our graduate programme, which has already converted 14 out of 16 graduates to permanent roles.
Through these initiatives, Blu Label Technology is positioning itself to meet and anticipate the evolving needs of our markets. We are setting new benchmarks for customer experience and operational excellence by maintaining unwavering focus on reliability, innovation and security.
BLU Label Unlimited Integrated Annual Report 2025
