About Nelri Venzke
Senior Design Director, Absa Personal and Private Banking
Nelri Venzke is a Senior Design Director at Absa Bank, leading cross-functional teams across Personal and Private Banking. With 20+ years of experience, she delivers solutions that fuse creativity and impact.
She’s driven design at scale—accelerating UX, unifying platforms, and embedding systems that align with business and customer goals. Nelri is also a passionate mentor and holds executive education from Kellogg and Harvard Business School.
Before Absa, she held leadership roles at top design and innovation agencies, consistently positioning design as a catalyst for transformation across industries.
Talk topic
Partnership, not Plug-and-Play: Turning Global Tech into Local Relevance
Nelri will share lessons from Absa’s Salesforce rollout—how global platforms arrive with built-in assumptions and how rushing to customise can backfire. Nelri explores how planning for culture, adoption, and learning enables strategic speed, showing that true local relevance comes from understanding the product first and adapting with intent.