Africa’s largest bank by assets, Standard Bank, the parent company of Stanbic Bank Ghana, has seen its mobile traffic growing 100% a year as customers embrace more convenient and efficient solutions for their banking needs.
During 2015, 825 million financial transactions worth $29 billion were processed through the banking app.
As a consequence of this, branch transactional volumes have declined and ATM and branch transactions now make up less than 5% of total banking transactions.
According to Peter Schlebusch, Standard Bank’s Chief Executive for Personal & Business Banking, 95% of Standard Bank’s transactions are already electronic, making it a genuinely digital bank.
“The vast bulk of Standard Bank’s Personal & Business Banking strategy to 2020 is about how we can use digital capabilities to deliver an even better customer experience. This entails putting customers in control, providing more convenience, and extracting key customer insights from our rich data so that the bank becomes more proactive, relevant and easy to use.”
Online and app banking has truly transformed the way customers engage with their bank, enabling them to bank on their terms whenever they want.
Mr Schlebusch says Standard Bank has invested heavily in IT infrastructure to ensure that the bank has a single view of the customer, and the customer has a single instant view of their complete banking services regardless of geography, product or customer segment. The app includes the ability to open accounts online, move money quickly and easily off a single mobile device.
Standard Bank will continue to leverage off increased smartphone penetration. In Africa, the internet is being predominantly accessed by the smart mobile device. The Mobile Africa 2015 study, conducted by GeoPoll and World Wide Worx, found that 51% of Ghana use their phones to access the internet.
Standard Bank continues to enhance its integrated universal banking app, which allows personal, business and high net worth customers to view and transact with a single digital ID across multiple geographies, including South Africa, Ghana, Namibia, Botswana, Uganda and Standard Bank Offshore.
Additional launches in countries in which Standard Bank operates are expected in the coming months.
“We are committed to Africa and proudly call the continent our home. Africa loves mobile. This is why we are so excited about how technology and data is allowing us to get even closer to our customers. We are steadfast on a strategy of tapping into the increasing use of technology, like smartphones, tablets and wearables, across the continent to become a truly integrated internet-based financial services business,” says Mr Schlebusch.
As innovative solutions for an increasingly mobile, tech savvy and cost conscious client base continue to be harnessed, the bank’s vision is clear: To become a digital leader in Africa.
To succeed in this, Standard Bank has placed the customer at the heart of the bank’s digital strategy, with a remarkable list of first to market innovations to date.
These include the single digital ID across multiple countries, biometric identification for mobile banking and an app enabling clients to trade across 29 different stock exchanges off their mobile device. It also includes a 24/7 banking instant messaging service for Private & Prestige customers via WeChat – with further developments imminent
The customer experience in the future will be worlds apart from what it was just a few years ago. Where customers pressed ten buttons before to conduct a simple banking transaction, the intelligence of the future will better understand and anticipate their behaviour in advance and only one click will be needed to set in motion multiple responses and outcomes.
These future digital capabilities will not only be more convenient and engaging for customers, but can also be expected to reduce costs.
Source: 3news.com|Ghana
Twitter: @3Newsgh
