NIGERIA:As First Bank Payment Cards Hit 10m

FirstBank of Nigeria recently emerged the first financial institution in Nigeria and the West-Africa to issue 10 million cards to customers across the sub-region.

With this development, the premier financial institution, and Nigeria’s most valuable bank brand becomes the second bank in Africa to achieve this feat.

Financial analysts, who spoke on the feat over the weekend, said it was in line with the bank’s brand promise to put its customers first and continuously improve its business to serve them better.

The record-breaking achievement is reminiscent of a similar milestone attained two years ago when the Bank was named the ‘First Financial Institution in Nigeria’ to achieve sustained alternative channels transaction volumes of 100 million transactions in December 2015 and May 2016.

FirstBank has sustained its edge in payment card issuance with its Instant issuance/Instant activation technology, which was pioneered about seven years ago. This also informed the Bank’s consistency in maintaining the highest active Card ratio in the industry, the analysts said.

The laudable feats have earned the financial institution series of awards and accolades. Recently, the bank bagged three Interswitch awards in electronic payment as ‘the fastest mobile penetration bank across Africa’, the ‘highest card transacting bank’, and the highest issuer of Verve cards.

Commenting on the achievements in an interview with THISDAY, the Chief Executive Officer/ Managing Director of First Bank of Nigeria Limited and Subsidiaries, Dr. Adesola Adeduntan said: “We can attest that our customers have become more technology savvy and we will continue to encourage this attitude with our commitment to world class service delivery as we work to ensure optimal performance and availability of all our alternative channels, to meet and exceed the expectations of our customers.

He added: “The bank currently processes over 78 per cent of its customer transactions through self-service channels.”

These, according to him, were clear indications that “the giant strides taken by the sub-Saharan leading bank brand towards fostering its banking technologies are well aligned to the “fast-paced technological advancement in today’s ever evolving financial ecosystem.”

Adeduntan also revealed in a recent interview that the bank will achieve 30 million customer base and 70 per cent digital banking transactions by 2019.

He said: “Our strategy is focused on significantly growing our customer base. We plan on having minimum of 30 million customer account over the three years.

“Our aggressive digital marketing initiatives, entail, migrating our existing and new customers to alternative channels, namely First Online, Firstmobile, USSD and ATM cards. That is the way forward for us and we are making significant progress already.

With these remarkable feats, analysts say, First Bank deserves a big thumbs up.

SOURCE:THISDAY