Wema Bank is shaping the future with launch of pioneering ALAT
Crowded banking halls, long queues at ATMs and a daunting amount of paperwork: these have long been the hallmarks of banking in Nigeria. For even the most resilient person, a trip to the bank is an overwhelmingly stressful experience. It is also something that people go through often, with many regular banking tasks still requiring a physical visit to a branch. While advances in digital technology have opened up new channels and mean there are fewer reasons to visit, their functionality is limited. For everything beyond the most simple transactions, enduring a visit is still a necessity.
As the convergence unfolds at Wema Bank, a far-reaching strategy for transforming the entirety of the Nigerian banking experience is slowly crystallising
This status quo is mirrored on the back end of banking operations as well. Behind-the-scenes processes are typically sluggish, which leads to very long wait times. This all adds up to create a seemingly unending list of frustrations for the average customer.
Quantity isn’t quality
While many Nigerian banks have committed a significant amount of resources to making banking more convenient for their customers, they have primarily approached it by expanding the footprint of their branches. By building more physical locations, they hope to better accommodate the daily flood of people visiting to complete transactions, open accounts and resolve any other issues that may arise. But the drawbacks of physical expansion far outweigh the benefits. An increase in the number of branches may help a bank manage the number of customers it has to deal with every day and increase its brand presence, but ever-growing building and maintenance costs diminish any potential gains. Add in the necessary investment in human resources needed to support additional branches, and any physical expansion becomes a risk on the bottom line of a bank.
As well as adding branches, several banks in Nigeria have made varying degrees of commitment to furthering some sort of digital banking strategy. Mostly, their efforts involve deploying a combination of internet banking services, mobile apps for smartphones and creating an Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) portal for GSM mobile phone users. Unfortunately, the success of these digital channels has been limited; their high cost combined with the limited penetration of internet connectivity in Nigeria has hampered their success. The channels themselves have also proved to be inconsistent and unreliable at times. Consequently, more uptake has been seen in the use of USSD than all other internet-dependent channels combined.
But USSD is not without its limitations and, while its usage is increasing, it has not been able to stem the tide of customers making their way to the banking halls. The Nigerian banking experience is ripe for disruption, and innovation has recently appeared from what many would have considered the most unlikely source.
