Rob Giles is the senior banking advisor, Retail Banking at Access Bank Group. With over a decade at Access Bank Plc his journey has been fueled by a strategic vision for financial inclusion and innovation in retail banking.
Mr. Giles’ expertise lies in spearheading initiatives that serve millions of customers across Africa, with a commitment to value creation and economic empowerment. His role at Access Bank allows him to harness diverse perspectives to drive growth and foster a culture of inclusivity.
In this interview with Techeconomy he spoke about the bank’s retail strategy transforming the financial landscape in Nigeria and indeed Africa, through innovation and collaboration.
TE: What role has digital innovation played in Access Bank’s retail banking strategy, and how has it impacted customer engagements?
Rob Giles (RG): Digital is at the core of everything that we do. As you probably know, we’re a bank with over 60 million customers. 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 those customers 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 continue to use paper. We would need 10s of 1000s of branches across the country to do so. Therefore, digital innovation; having one of the first mobile apps in the country, USSD banking, have allowed us to have a truly digital-first strategy.
So most customers today, find out about us online. They see us in your news houses. They see us on their entertainment sites. They see us on Instagram, Facebook, X and that’s how they discover that the bank exists from the convenience of their home. They dial *901, and open an account. It’s as simple as that. They download the mobile app.
Digital platforms are no longer ‘alternate delivery channels’, rather the (bank) branch is the new alternate. 90% of transactions take place outside the branch. They take place on a phone, whether that’s a feature phone or a smartphone. So, it has truly transformed digital banking and banking generally; right from the point of discovery, becoming a customer and then serving the customer; whether that’s transactional or even are beyond banking products that the customers use.
TE: How does your strategy increase your retail customers and also get people more into the financial system?
RG: A very good question; financial inclusion is one of our core objectives, and it’s a core objective of Nigeria driven through the Banking Committee and the Central Bank of Nigeria. Historically, we were not doing well. We were one of the worst countries on the continent on financial inclusion, but that gap has significantly closed. If you look at the EFInA reports that come out every year, we’ve got better activities, and that’s very much through mobile financial inclusion. You have collaboration taking place between banks and fintechs.
You have banks utilizing USSD, mobile banking applications, but also agency banking to reach the underserved. That branch-based model is very inconvenient for customers; someone who’s working, whether that’s in a company, whether that’s for government, or whether that’s as a trader or even a small business, the act of going to a bank to one open an account, but secondly, to do your transactions is taking time away from work, and that’s taking time away from business generation activity, or at best, is 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, and so you’re never far from an accessing our agent.
Customers want to talk to an individual to help 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 in-app service. So, 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 transport cost of getting to a branch, the time spent in a branch where you could have been trading or doing your business or doing anything else that you wanted to do. So digital has transformed the process allowing our customers the convenience they desire. Don’t come to the branch, rather we have now come to you.
TE: As you have rightly pointed out: the customer is at the base of your digital transformation, but have you been able to tackle some of the pain points for the customers?
RG: It’s a great question, and one of the things that 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 secure and they want to eat. So, it’s not even they want to shop, they want to eat. And therefore, when they want to use financial services, we have to consider what the customer really 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 bank branch, but when you’re 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 KYC [Know Your Customer] and the documentation you require for opening an account.
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’s massively advanced financial inclusion when it comes to transacting.
People have access to used cards. They have access to mobile and they can use person-to-person. If you use access more, you can make a QR (contactless) payment. So we’ve increased the platforms that customers could use to make payments. Everything we do, and particularly now, as you look at the kind of services you have on Accessmore app it’s no longer ‘check your balance’. It’s ‘Do 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 stamp statement? Accessmore is there for you to access it 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 and fill-in forms. We have information about you; your turnover, history, salary information, etc. And so we’re able to pre-qualify customers for a loan so that they go on to Accessmore and access loan, and it’s in their account within seconds. So we’re removing those pain points.
First, it’s all about understanding what the customer wants to do. Take that out of the branch, take that out of the physical environment where they’re wasting their time, and make it instant and often freely available on the App.
TE: How has the bank’s mobile app contributed to retail business growth?
RG: Digital payments are economic drivers that help businesses succeed. If you can’t get paid, you have a problem in business, and so we look to solve that. As you have known, Access Bank became a financial Holdings Company a couple of years ago, and so we have a number of verticals.
We have the Bank, payments company, lending company, an insurance company, pensions, and through the Holdings Company we’ve been able to partner effectively to better serve merchants across the country.
So, we have developed Instant Payment links or you can pay by code and get instant confirmation and instant value at the merchant shop, and, of course, by Point of Sales (PoS) terminal. So, we’ve been able to improve our proposition for merchants.
The majority of trades in Nigeria are still person-to-person. We see a lot of them, 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 customer.
And so we’re able to serve them in better ways and make them have 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. And so again, it’s an example of how digital has helped us and payments can be made using USSD.
They can be made on the mobile app. They can even be made using a chat bot. So we have ‘Tamada By Access’ on our banking app, where you can interact with a bot and make payments. We’re even pioneering payments through phone number to make it easier for people who don’t want to remember their bank account number and to go into the app and send my phone number as well specific products for segments like women, SME and youth.
Women are at the core of everything that access bank does, I think hopefully you’ve all been able to come to our ‘W Initiative’ that has become a community.
We’ve gone beyond issuing products for women. We’ve created a community for women. Access W Initiative is present countries where Access bank operates. We are making a continental impact as part of our goals to facilitating inter-African trade. Our W Banking proposition has the W Power Loan, which I think we’ve had for over a decade now, offering preferential rates and terms for women to get access to fund their businesses. Our digital lending team also has loans for women. So, it’s not the big loans for big SMEs. It’s an instant loan that can be accessed via a mobile device. We have the W branded debit card so we can recognize people who are in our W Community.
We recognize in access bank that if we make a significant impact on women, we will make an impact in families, and we will make an impact in 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, again, are segmented. For the access solo products, the account will transition from being a parent operated account to the 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 prepare them through our financial literacy programs to understand that when they’re when they’re 18, they will be operating the account themselves, at which point they will get access to their own debit cards, mobile app and ability to transact on their account.
TE: How are you (Access Bank) penetrating rural areas with digital solutions?
RG: Yeah, it’s a very good question. It’s something that sets us apart as a bank. If you look at our agent network, with 600,000 agents that rivals any of the other agent numbers. The difference with Access Bank in the financial ecosystem is that we have about 600 branches across the country, and so that blend of physical branches that are in every state of the country, and then agents that are supported by them.
The hub allows us to effectively reach all of the corners of Nigeria and into the rural areas while urban areas are not left out. So, using the branch network and supporting our agents with the liquidity backed by the field managers we can reach the most remote area, and that’s a core part of our strategy.
We don’t want to be only in urban areas, because that’s not where we’re needed to solve the financial inclusion problem. We also work with international partners, to help provide financial inclusion solutions in IDP camps.
TE: Customer Experience (CX) cannot be overemphasized. How are the digital solutions enhancing your customer support and prompt resolving of issues?
RG: So, it’s a great question, and it’s about removing the friction points for individuals. The advent of BVN (Bank Verification Number) makes it easier for us to crosscheck against national databases, and therefore the onboarding process is almost instant. And if it were on USSD, you dial *901#.
If it’s on the mobile app, you download the mobile app, put in your NIN, BVN and become a customer instantly.
It’s so seamless. That has advantages for the bank; we can profitably serve customers that we wouldn’t be able to serve if there was a long paper application, and it wouldn’t make sense for the customers to take their time to come to the branch. So it means that we can streamline the kind of messages that we give our customers and the kind of products that we offer to them.
TE: What should the customers expect from the retail banking division in the nearest future?
RG: Well, I’d be giving away secrets if I talked about what’s upcoming, and we look forward to inviting you soon for some product launch. Generally, what I see coming in the industry would be a lot more digital innovation taking place in the remittance space.
The remittances into Nigeria are at about $20 billion a year and growing which is significant to the economy; the GDP, and more importantly, they are a critical lifeline for people to go to school, do their business, 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 and more important partnerships that we’re signing up. It’s coming into Nigeria, and all they’re doing is crashing the cost. They’re improving the speed, and they’re crashing the cost of remittances.
You’ve seen Access Bank recently partnered with MasterCard. So, Access Bank, with over 20 countries of presence, has the opportunity to build its own payment rails.
We call that ‘Access Africa’ linking Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Ghana, etc. and that can be used by individuals for traditional money transfers, but also businesses, for business transfers. And that’s that’s something that we are building.
But we can’t do this alone hence we partner with other remittance companies to expand our outreach, whether that’s the ability to terminate into a mobile wallet in in Kenya, for example, or whether that’s our partnership with global schemes like Visa and MasterCard to be able to transfer to/from China, to facilitate trade.
