Digital Banking, Global Security Trends, User Experience these are some of the topics discussed during the Inlaks summit on Friday, 18th October 2019.
The use of bank branches for distribution remains expensive and difficult to scale. Also, access is challenging as the distance to a near branch can be daunting. This was pointed out by Mr. Patrick Akinwutan, MD Ecobank while speaking on the topic: Bank of the Future in Africa: Digital or Brick and Mortar.
He Said Mobile banking is a welcome improvement to the banking world at large and the use of smartphones in Africa has been predicted to increase to 66% in 2025, which means that the financial services landscape in Africa is fast-moving and dynamic. There is a rapid shift to mobile in the adoption of digital channels and over 80% of transactions are done with the mobile banking app.
According to Mr Patrick, Ecobank is a leading Pan African bank with an unrivaled platform in middle Africa. Ecobank has transformed her mobile and agency banking channels to serve as the new front line for customers; their agency banking platform continues to broaden across distribution with channels over 300,000 agents in Africa, especially in Nigeria. The new version of the agency banking app offers an expanded service for consumers and they have only one mobile application for the 36 countries they serve, with which customers can do anything. The application offers affordable, fast and convenient service and they have onboard over 200,000 merchants on Ecobankpay with collection value exceeding 2bn naira.
Ahmed Khidhir, Senior Consultant Business Solutions at Temenos, spoke on Becoming a True Digital Bank: The Temenos Approach had this to say. Providing outstanding customer experience is the main concern at Temenos and customers have much higher expectations from providers of digital services. Customers will not be satisfied if what you’re giving them is not up to what they expect from you because one size doesn’t fit all. Tailoring a customer’s experience to fit their range is very important and to do that it is necessary to utilize data to personalize customers’ experience during engagement in the digital bank by using digital Analytics.
Ade Bajomo, Executive director, Technology and operations, Access Bank speaking on: Creating a Seamless User Experience Across All Channels said that; for managing customer content, Omnichannel banking is used to provide experience for customers. Banking is evolving and there’s a need to constantly innovate and for innovators to move with and embrace the path of the emerging technology.
Moyo Odeyemi who represented Dapo Adewole, EY Partner, and Technology Advisory on Global Security Trends in Banking. He said that we’re in the 4th era of industrial revolution and technology investment and digital transformation programs remain high in the agenda of the financial sector (About 85% as at 2018), but in the meantime few banks currently consider themselves as either maturing or a digital leader because with great power comes great responsibility. Hyperconnectivity, data crunching, AI, Process automation, machine learning all come with their various risks because with more data and more speed, there are tremendous risks. Digital transformation can’t be resisted, your cybersecurity risk only goes higher with your inevitable reliance on technology. So it should be noted that Cyber is no longer a technology issue, it is a business issue.
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