EFinA Says IT, Others Help Bank 25m Customers in 7 Years

Ms. Modupe Ladipo, chief executive officer, Enhancing Financial Innovation & Access (EFInA), has said that financial inclusion drives added about 25 million customers to the banked segment in last seven years, underscoring the success of research, advocacy, capacity building and innovation fund provisioning towards financial in Nigeria.

Ladipo told Nigeria CommunicationsWeek that based on data EFIna obtained from 2008 to 2014, in terms of number and population that customer satisfaction, proper regulations and a number of innovations launched operators, added value to the financial inclusion and its sustainability efforts as customers made their ways into such areas as opening bank accounts, insurance, pensions, mobile money or microfinance bank.

“And it takes a lot to achieve such feat. We are looking at the sizes of some African nations. For the banks, you talk about Know Your Customers (KYC), mobile agents, regulations. In fact, every regulation has paid its role in trying to get us to where we ought to be. The providers have also considered ways to cut their operational costs”.

The EFIna boss said that critical in Financial Inclusion is meeting the needs of, mostly, rural dwellers, who also are in dire need of the financial services that are not so costly. “That is where the Agent Banking Regulations came up in 2013. What the concept means, is that those ‘mums’ and papas’’ shops can be used as agents by banks; in such that when you go there you can conduct certain banking transactions.

She added that the challenges rural dwellers are facing are obvious. “For instance, if it will cost N200 to visit the nearest branch of a bank, probably to go and deposit N500, it doesn’t make (savings) sense”.

Ladipo said, “People talk about M-pessa. It took the operators three years to break even; get volumes. It was only towards the end of 2012 that mobile money licences were given in Nigeria; we are coming to our three years. To us, it is like a reflection point.

Elsewhere, the 2014 customer satisfaction index (CSI) released by the KPMG showed that, “It is understandable that banks have not raced to launch PFM tools, since it is a completely foreign concept to the majority of consumers.

Mike Davidsen, financial services advisory at KPMG, said that many consumers perform basic PFM (a type of e-transactions) tasks on a regular basis, from tracking discretionary spending to paying bills.

With the proliferation of digital technology, PFM now encompasses everything from categorizing card transactions to receiving low-balance alerts to prevent overdraft.