'About Winnie Mulli
About
Winnie Mulli
Senior Design Director
Absa Personal and Private Banking
Winnie is a digital innovation leader with passion for using technology to solve meaningful problems at scale. She is a Senior Design Director at Absa, where she focuses on shaping the future of banking.
Winnie’s work has earned recognition across the technology and financial services industries. She has been featured on Elle Magazine, is a recipient of the Nedbank Achiever Award, the Standard Bank & Siemens Women in Tech Accelerator Award, and the Hello Ambassador Award. She was also selected to be on TED’s global platform, joining a small group of South Africans whose Tedx ideas have been shared with a global audience.
She also built Pappr, a payments intelligence API for non-profits that uses tokenised donor data instead of storing sensitive personal or payment information. By transforming recurring payment activity into actionable insights, Pappr helps organisations improve donor retention, reduce failed payments, and build stronger relationships with their supporters.
With a career spanning product design, digital transformation, and financial technology, Winnie is driven by a belief that innovation should create measurable value for both organisations and society. Her work bridges strategy, technology, and human-centred design to build products that simply improve lives.
She is currently pursuing an MBA in Global Strategy, deepening her expertise in innovation, leadership, and sustainable business growth.
Talk topic
Being revealed soon
Tech vs Human: The Strategic Advantage of Empathy
In a world obsessed with scaling technology, we're placing the focus on what truly matters: humanity. Our belief is simple; the future of Africa isn’t about technology - it’s about people. And a solution that doesn’t resonate with people, rarely scales.
When you work across nine countries, as our Absa ARO team does, the flaws in the “copy-paste” approach to innovation become impossible to ignore. Real impact doesn’t come from dumping global solutions. It comes from embedding, listening and designing in context.
Jade will use Absa’s work on Digital Wallets to explain this philosophy in practice; not as a story of building yet another financial tool, but of creating something deeply local, personal, and grounded in empathy, trust and dignity. When you design with people (not just for them), you build relevance and trust - and that’s what truly scales.
