Nigeria: Stanbic Bank encourages banks to accelerate digital banking by embracing partnerships and enhancing agility

Stanbic Bank’s Head of Digital and Innovation has urged banks to collaborate with complementary partners and invest more in agile technologies to expedite digital banking.

Estelle Jacqueline Asare emphasized that this approach would enable banks to offer more personalized experiences to their customers, thereby fostering loyalty. She made these remarks while participating in a panel discussion on digital banking trends at the West Africa Digital Leaders’ Summit held at the Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City, Accra.

Sharing insights on a panel discussion on ‘Making End-to-End Digital Banking a Reality,’ Estelle Asare highlighted the importance of banks adopting a customer-centric approach, learning from Fintechs’ agility and innovation.

She noted that “Customer centricity and Agility is what is driving fintech growth. They focus on customer needs and pain points, how fast they can resolve them and provide convenience. Banks must learn from them to enable the provision of better digital services.”

“If banks want to innovate and survive, we must look at how to partner with complementary service providers and leverage each other’s strengths. As banks, we need to consider how we integrate using APIs and create open banking platforms to support the entirety of the customers’ lifestyle and life journey.

“Integrating with platforms that enable us to harness data, allows us to provide hyper-customization to our customers and that is what makes them stick to us. Harnessing all of that to provide targeted offers to our customers will be a game changer for banks,” she added.

Ms. Asare also emphasized the importance of enhancing cybersecurity measures and implementing advanced biometric verification to secure systems and mitigate risks in the evolving landscape of digital banking.

She mentioned that “The growth of digital banking and AI calls for heightened focus on cybersecurity. If we don’t keep our eyes on the risks and ensure that the bank is secure, we will end up losing more than our digitally active customers. We will lose the bank itself.”

The West Africa Digital Leaders’ Summit, organized by technology firm Temenos, convened specialists, experts, and industry leaders to discuss various topics such as digital banking trends, cloud banking, opportunities and trends in the payments sector, and the role of digital transformation in increasing revenue and expanding a bank’s customer base.