How one of Ghana’s largest banks, UMB, went from 0-500 per day in customer onboarding with SPEED!
Objective
Banking and financial services in Ghana, must digitalize rapidly if they want to ensure financial inclusion and compete in the global digital economy.
Retail banking services in Ghana, as in most other sub-Sahara African countries, are conducted primarily through walk-ins at bank branches, or internet banking, which has limited functionalities. Therefore conducting a banking transaction in Ghana can be quite tedious and time-consuming.
UMB Bank, one of Ghana’s largest banks, wanted to go digital with its banking services, which entailed migrating about 90% of its in-branch services to digital platforms.
As part of its digital strategy, UMB wanted to introduce a mobile banking app that would increase convenience, get more customers on board and extend financial services to the unbanked prospects of UMB.
It was time to get up to SPEED.
In 2016, the global digital economy was worth $11.5 trillion, equivalent to 15.5% of the world’s overall GDP. It is expected to reach 25% in less than a decade. However, countries like Ghana are currently capturing only a fraction of this growth and need to strategically invest in the foundational elements of their digital economy to keep pace.
World Bank Group. 2019. Digital Economy for Ghana Diagnostic Report. Washington, DC
Getting up to SPEED with Modefin
Identify features to include
It was important to understand which features would offer convenience, speed and ease of use to customers.
Flexi and modular
Any solution that was developed had to be scalable and flexible, in order to be able to add to the features stack and offer a seamless omnichannel banking experience.
Simple UI
For the application to be easily adopted by customers, the UI had to be easy-to-use, easy-to-understand and it had to be light enough to work in low-bandwidth areas as well.
Support & Integration
The platform needed to support the back-end agency operations besides being able to easily integrate with third party applications.Feature-rich SPEED!
Check account information
Request for information on loans, deposits, credit cards, investments, & more
Make money transfers or requests for transfers
Make a cardless cash withdrawal from ATM
Manage their deposits
Bill Payments – Users can pay various public and private sector service providers
Airtime Top-up – users can top-up their Airtime for any mobile number
Standing Order – customers can create or stop a standing order
Loyalty/Rewards Program – enables mobile banking customers to earn rewards or loyalty points based on their transaction profile
Impact
15
million USD
monthly transactions
500
customers onboarding per day
84k+
customers within 18 months of operations.
High RoI. High business impact.
SPEED has customers and UMB delighted.
Enabling Business Impact
The introduction of SPEED mobile banking platform has helped UMB gain more customers, helped Agency banking and created measurable business impact.
Agency Banking:
Modefin’s SPEED app offered the entire agent life-cycle operations including cash in/out, balance inquiries, mini-statements, float requests, cash out via prepaid and master/visa cards, change M-pin, changing passwords and PIN, blocking and unblocking passwords, viewing transactions, and more.
It also offered support for back-end operations such as user registration & management, customer registration, agent registration, biller management, SMS alerts, report module, and audit logs.
Business Impact:
With SPEED, UMB was able to offer convenience and ease with a seamless omnichannel banking experience. With SPEED, UMB was able to overcome constraints and limitations of their core legacy systems and create enhanced customer experiences, at speed.
“
Yes, the introduction of the UMB SpeedApp has made it possible for our Bank to offer seamless, swift and convenience banking to our mainline customers (Retail and SME customers). This has excited our corporate clients to push for enhanced internet banking services for their use. The roll out of the UMB wallet has appealed to the many banked and unbanked prospective clients to approach UMB through our wallet and after enjoying our exciting digital Speedapp services, have been convinced to open mainstream bank accounts in UMB. Our other customers who had initially operated a single account are very delighted to open additional accounts , partnership accounts and introduce other new clients to our Bank.
”
Myles Hagan, Head of Channels, UMB