Robert Giles is the Senior Banking Advisor, Retail Banking at Access Bank Plc, with the mandate to drive financial inclusion and digital banking. His journey in the last ten years at Access Bank Plc and Diamond Bank Plc has been fueled by a strategic vision for financial inclusion and innovation in retail banking. His expertise lies in spearheading initiatives that serve millions of customers across Africa.
In this interview with Bamidele Ogunwusi, he bares his mind on the strategies of the bank to remain on top of the ladder in the banking industry by employing digital banking and plans by the bank to redefine diaspora remittances into the continent with its large presence in Africa and beyond.
What role has digital innovation played in Access Bank’s retail banking strategy and how has it impacted customer engagements?
Let me say it here without mincing words that digital is at the core of everything that we do at Access Bank. As you probably know, we are a bank with over 60 million customers, and if you look at the evolution of the bank over its first 15 to 20 years, those customers were still in the handfuls of millions and they came to a branch, opened an account using paper, and became a customer of the bank.
And that was the early days of financial inclusion. Banking was historically for corporates and businesses, and then through branch-based banking, which expanded rapidly across the country, people were included. But there’s no way we could have been a bank with 60 million customers if we continued to use paper, we would need tens of thousands of branches across the country to do so.
So digital innovation, one of the first mobile apps in the country, USSD banking, has allowed us to have a truly digital-first strategy. So, most customers today find out about us online. They will see us in your news online, they see us in your publications and they see us on their entertainment sites. They see us on Instagram, Facebook and X and discover that the bank exists.
From there, they simply, from the convenience of their home, their work, or wherever they are, dial #901 and open an account. It is as simple as that. The same with the mobile app. The days are gone when banks have to drive to get their existing customers to now download a mobile app and experience alternate delivery channels.
Digital banking is no longer an alternate delivery channel, the branch is alternate. 90 per cent of transactions take place outside the branch, they take place on a phone, whether a feature phone or a smartphone.
What are the strategies you put in place to increase the adoption of digital channels of retail customers and how does it enhance financial inclusion?
Financial inclusion is one of our core objectives, and it is a core objective of Nigeria, driven through the Bankers Committee and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). Historically, we were not doing well, we were one of the worst countries on the continent for financial inclusion, but the good news is that that gap has significantly closed.
If you look at the Enhancing Financial Innovation and Access EFInA reports that come out every year, we have gone up to one of the better ranked countries, and that’s through mobile financial inclusion. You have collaboration taking place between banks and fintechs. You have banks utilising USSD, mobile banking applications and also agency banking to reach the underserved.
That branch-based model is very inconvenient for customers, someone who is working, whether in a company, for government, or whether as a trader or even a small business operator, the act of going to a bank to one open an account and secondly, to do your transactions is taking time away from work, and that’s taking time away from business generation activity, or at best, it’s taking time away from family, and people don’t want to do that anymore. So, digital has helped customers to be served where they want to be served. We have around 600,000 agents today, so you can imagine you are never far from an AccessClosa agent.
So, some people still want to talk to an individual that’s important in financial inclusion, that anyone who thinks that you can just roll out a mobile app and customers will be financially included, is wrong. Customers, who traditionally would use the Ajo system or any other system, want to talk to an individual, and that individual helps them understand and explain how technology works, how USSD works, how their money is safe, how they will receive transaction alerts, and how to get the best out of the service.
Our agent network plays a very important role in building that bridge. From then on, it comes to lowering the cost to serve by using mobile and digital. And I think when you look at the cost to serve, you have to include what is the transport cost of getting to a branch. What is the time spent in a branch where you could have been trading, doing your business or doing anything else that you wanted to do? So, digital has transformed, so it has allowed us to find more customers where they want to be found. Don’t come to the branch, we have now come to you as well as be served where you want to be served, not where we want to serve.
How has the bank’s digital transformation journey addressed pain points in the retail banking customer experience?
One of the things I always talk about with my team is that a customer doesn’t necessarily want to bank, they don’t want to make a payment, they want to keep their money secured, and they want to eat and they want to shop. Therefore, when they want to use financial services, we have to consider what the customer wants to do. So things like embedded finance, buy-now-pay-later, making sure that you can get access to a loan, not by getting a personal loan from a branch, but when you are making a purchase online, you can make that purchase and spread that purchase with installment credit. That’s a great example of how we get closer to the customer.
The other pain points are around the basics of Know Your Customer (KYC) and the documentation you require for opening an account. If you think about it, the banking community in Nigeria has gone a very long way with its three tiers of KYC, which allows people to get basic accounts remotely, and that’s just by opening a digital wallet. And I think that has massively advanced financial inclusion. When it comes to transactions, people have access to cards, they have mobile access, person-to-person. If you use AccessMore, you can make a QR payment.
So, we have increased the form factors that customers can use to make a payment. And I think everything that we do, and particularly now, as you look at the kind of services you have on AccessMore it is no longer for checking your balance, making debits and credits. If you need a new debit card, you can order it on AccessMore. Would you like a statement? You order it on AccessMore, and it comes to you instantly. Do you need a stamped statement? You can order it on Access More, and it will come to you instantly.
If you need it for visa purposes, if you want a loan, you don’t need to come to the branch, you don’t need to come in and fill forms. We have information about you, we have your turnover, we have your history, and we have your salary information. And so we are able to pre-qualify customers for a loan so that they go on to AccessMore and access a loan, and it is in their account within seconds.
So we are removing those pain points. So it is all about understanding what the customer wants to do, take that out of the branch, take that out of the physical environment where they are wasting their time, and making it instant and often freely available on the App.
Can we know some of the digital payment solutions you have, and how they have helped retail business growth?
Digital payments are important for making money go around, that’s the economic driver, that’s how businesses succeed. If you can’t get paid, you have a problem in business, and so we look to solve that. As you will have seen, Access Bank became a financial holding company a couple of years ago, and so we have several verticals. We have the bank, we have the payments company, we have the lending company, we have insurance, and we have pensions. Through Hydrogen, we have been able to partner effectively to better serve merchants across the country. So Hydrogen has developed Instant Payment links, so you can pay by payment links, pay by code and get instant confirmation and instant value at the merchant, and, of course, by POS.
So through, through the partnership with Hydrogen, we’ve been able to improve our proposition for merchants, and I think you will have seen the hydrogen branding at point of sale.
We still have a lot of payments that are sometimes seen as individual payments. The majority of trade in Nigeria is still person-to-person. And so what, what we see a lot of, and again, using data and analytics, people who may have appeared to be personal customers, Seven and a half million of them, we discovered, are business customers. And so we are able to serve them in better ways and give them access to some of the non-financial services offerings from our SME team, where we provide business seminars about how to set up your business, run your business, keep your account, separate your personal life from your business life, and so again, it’s an example of how digital that’s helped us.
Payments can be made using USSD, they can be made on the mobile app, they can even be made using a chatbot. So we have Tamada on our banking app, where you can interact with a chatbot and make payments. We are even pioneering payments through phone numbers to make it easier for people who don’t want to remember their bank account number and simply go onto the app and send by phone number as well.
Can you give us some insights into specific products by the bank especially for women, SME and youth?
So, women are at the core of everything that Access Bank does. I think hopefully you have all been able to come to our W banking events that has become a community. We have gone beyond issuing products for women, we have created a community for women, covering many aspects beyond financial. Access W is not a Nigeria solution because Access Bank is present across many African countries, you will find Access W existing in those countries as well.
I was recently in Botswana, where we launched Access W. Our propositions for women are intended to make a continental impact, not necessarily a local impact, because when you see the trade that happens, and our goal of facilitating intra-African trade, we want that community to be beyond Nigeria. We want Nigeria to have access to the global and African community for trade, and we want to connect women.
So our W banking proposition has the W Power loan, which I think we have had for over a decade now, which offers preferential rates and terms for women to get access to fund their businesses.
Our digital lending team also has loans for women. So it is not only the big loans for big SMEs, it is the instant loans that can be accessed via a remote mobile device. We have the W branded debit card so we can recognise people who are in our W community. And we have many seminars and events which range from women in business. We have partnerships that are focused on helping women learn to drive and then get access to loans to buy their first car, as well as seminars and training programs to help women get better outcomes in their businesses.
We recognize in Access Bank that if we make a significant impact on women, we will make an impact on families, and we will make an impact on the broader economy. So W banking is something that’s core to us, and where we invest a lot of our time.
Our youth solutions are segmented. We have our Access Solo products for our young children, and we follow a life stage approach, so the account will transition from being a parent-operated account to a child-operated account once they reach 18. So as every year goes by, our communications with our children customers get increasingly relevant to their age and we prepare them through our financial literacy programs to understand that when they are 18, they will be operating the account themselves, at which point they will get access to their own debit cards, their own mobile app and ability to transact on their accounts.
Fintechs as collaborators
Many bankers I know talk about fintechs often as competition, but the collaboration opportunity is much greater. The majority of transactions in the market are still taking place in cash, so we intend to collaborate.
In addressing this, we set up a dedicated team called the Partnership and Digital Capabilities Team, and their sole responsibility is to partner with financial technology companies to help them get better access to the market. That is partnering to enable fintechs to access payment services, whether that’s the instant payment services, partnerships through hydrogen for instant payments and even the sponsorship so that these institutions can issue cards. So, it is something that is very important and key to our strategy.
We have been doing this for a number of years, and we are now moving much beyond the traditional partnerships of banking, which is payments, lending and deposits, and also moving into strategic partnerships like we have with Coronation, one of the proudest solutions that we have on the mobile app; the ability to access the stock market and to invest in Nigerian equities on a real time basis.
So, now, our customers can click on wealth and investment management, and with very small barriers to entry. You can simply look at the market on your mobile app, and invest in Nigerian equities, and sell when you want. This is part of our financial inclusion drive, to give customers broader access to financial solutions that’s beyond simply deposit products, and to help create long-term wealth in the community.
What upcoming digital innovations or initiatives ideas will further drive retail business growth?
I will talk about what I see coming up in the industry, I think we are going to see a lot more digital innovations taking place in the remittance space. The remittances into Nigeria at around $20 billion a year and growing are significant to the economy. They are a significant contributor to GDP and more importantly they are a critical lifeline for people to go to school, to do their businesses and for many children who are funding their parents or extended families from across the world. We see that digital is crashing the cost of international remittances. There are more IMTO partnerships that are signing up and coming into Nigeria and all they are doing is crashing the cost. They are improving the speed and they are crashing the cost of remittances. That is a good thing and that is why we have set up our partnerships team to be able to partner with as many of these fintechs as possible and bring more money into the financial ecosystem. I think that we are going to see a lot of innovations.
What is Access Bank doing in this regard?
So, Access Bank with presence in over 20 countries has the opportunity to build its own payment routes. Access Africa links our country’s operation; Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Ghana, among others. Our Access Africa is our proprietary link that connects Africa and that can be used by individuals for traditional money transfers but also by businesses for business transfers. And that is something that we are building, but we realise that we cannot do this alone. And we, therefore, partner to bring in other remittance companies to expand our reach. Whether that is the ability to operate a mobile wallet in Kenya for example or our partnership with global schemes like Visa and Mastercard to be able to transfer to China or from China or Australia.
So, it is a combination of building Access Africa as our gateway to the world and we are able to provide a controlled ecosystem from Access to Access and also partnering with as many fintechs as possible to broaden that financial access. What we are seeing is that the digital innovations around money transfer are bringing down that cost.
With cost coming down what we expect is not only the economic benefits and more funds flowing into the economy but we will see it coming in formally. The better the reduction in the cost of remittance the more money we will see come in through the formal channels as opposed to the informal channels. This is a pan-African issue, the cost of remittances is still too high and we are able to solve it.
I can see remittances evolving beyond cash-based remittances but remittances of goods and services and so what I can imagine in the near future is that people who are sending funds for educational payments will directly be funding the educational payments. People who are sending funds for food will actually be facilitating commerce through online retailers and food will be delivered to the recipients. Those who are paying for their parents’ medical fees will be able to directly fund those medical fees. That solves two problems.
One, it makes sure that the intended use of the remittances is paid and it will help commerce grow in Nigeria and second, it will help deliver high quality produce at lower cost because we will grow that for the market. So that is an example of something I can see happening where remittances and commerce will start to converge.
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