Charles Kie is the Managing Director of Ecobank Nigeria, which has over 400 branches nationwide. He told a select group of journalists that the pan-Africa bank was focused on being a market leader, especially as the banking industry transits to the digital space, described as the future. He also spoke on other industry-related issues. Clara Nwachukwu was there. Excerpts:

What has changed since the last time you spoke to the press?
During my first interaction with the press, I made it clear that what Ecobank Nigeria is trying to achieve in this market clearly in the next five years is to reposition itself and become a market header. Being a market leader means having leadership economics that is clearly from a profitability perspective and ensuring that we not only become the most profitable bank in the market, but also achieve a competitive and better customer service and also create an environment where our people feel really motivated and feel to work with us.

To support that we designed the strategy last year, and one of the key aims of that strategy is also to ensure that we bring innovation into this market, and our innovation in the market proceeds into ensuring that the digital journey that we have embarked on will proceed into making ease of access to financial services and cost of access to financial services the lowest possible. To demonstrate how serious we were about this agenda, some of you may have noticed that last year, we hocked up to the market a mobile app that had features that almost no other bank in this market had. We have consistently been improving the services and features that mobile app has been delivering to our customers.

One of them is the fact that the first time in the Nigerian market, we are offering the possibility of making payments with QR Codes with MasterPass. It was a partnership that we had with MasterCard to allow payments to be made using the phones as opposed to using cards and POS. Today, I can that we are one of the banks if not the only bank that through its app can make instant transfer from Nigeria to almost all of the other countries where ECobank is present, more than 30 countries in the continent.

These innovations that are key digital innovations is where the bank is going, and as a group, we yearly set ourselves a target to try and achieve not less than 100 million customers by 2020, of which all we see for Nigeria will transform into not less than 40 million customers. Also, we have designed a clear agenda to achieve that and all these postulate into ensuring that our service to our customers is efficient, and also ensure that our people are up to the task and we are working on that. I am going to give you some of the things we are doing to achieve that.

Most importantly, we also place values on our shareholders by ensuring that our cost of operating in this country also has significance. Indeed, in less than 18 months, if you look at our financials by the end of June 2017, we have been able to increase our cost to income ratio from more than 60 per cent to 145 per cent now. It is obviously one of the best in the market. But even in terms of the quantum of our expense, we can claim that we are probably one of the lowest among the 16 important banks in the industry today, and this has been achieved by taking a strategic important view of our management expense, and make sure that we achieved operational excellence.

Some few measures that we have taken, one of which is that we have to reduce the number of our branches, but it’s important for our customers to understand that reducing the number of branches was precisely designed to improve our services to them. It is to ensure that instead of going to branches for transacting, they could actually use all of our digital channels as a mean of making their transacting easy and thereby reducing their cost of transacting in the industry. The other thing that we are doing is to ensure that we have a team that is actually in line with the prospect of growth that we have clearly set for ourselves, and if you look at some of the newspapers today, you will notice that we put there an advert to call for new graduates because we are recruiting.

We will be recruiting several hundreds of young Nigerians in the next few years, and we will train them to be the next generation of leaders in the industry, but more importantly, in Ecobank Nigeria. As we also move into the digital space, which you know is a millennial conversation, the team that will have to face our customers also have to reflect the kind of that we are effectively looking for. Therefore, by bringing the new generation of leaders into the organisation, we will be able to create a completely different rapport with our customers that is also on their way.