• Conducts 1 million ATM transaction during strike action
Ben Uzor Jr
As Nigeria gradually moves from cash-based to electronic based transactions by virtue of Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) cash-lite policy, United Bank of Africa (UBA) Plc which currently has 700 branches across the country has disclosed plans to deploy 25, 000 of Point of Sale (PoS) terminals in Lagos by December 2012. Luqman Balogun, group director, E-banking, UBA who made this revelation at a media parley in Lagos recently, said the bank was fully equipped to support CBN’s financial inclusion strategy.
According to Balogun, the recent nationwide strike by the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) to protest the removal of fuel subsidy was a lucid indication of the banks preparedness to implement CBN’s cashless drive. “We had a massive surge in the number of people who used our electronic channels during the nationwide strike action. Our ATMs, PoS terminals were up and running during the strike. We had a lot of customers who for the first time used our internet banking platform to conduct financial transactions.
“We recorded 1 million transactions on our ATMs during the strike. UBA currently does 5 million transactions on the ATMs monthly. We were able to keep out ATMs up and running. We even had an alert system in place to notify us when cash runs out at any ATM location. Our ATMs were also supporting cardless withdrawals where money can be sent to anyone. A recipient can walk up to a UBA ATM, access the cardless transaction, supply the access code and the ATM dispenses the cash.
“It was a test for us to see how effective our e-channels were and we came out tops.” Balogun, who allayed fears of increased internet fraud entertained by Nigerians as they migrate to the cashless mode, said that risk and security measures have been greatly improved on to address fraud. He expressed confidence in CBN’s cashless policy, adding it provides ample opportunity for banks to improve the performance of their service delivery infrastructure. More basically, according to him, e-channels would indeed deepen the customer base of banks by essentially taking financial services to the grassroots.
The UBA director noted that the CBN’s cash-lite would drive the usage of payment cards will significantly grow. He believes that cards will largely drive the attainment of the goals of cash-lite given their popularity and wide spread acceptance. “UBA issues 2.2 million Visa Cards out of the total 8.5 million cards in the country. We control 20 percent of the market. We are also planning to commence issuance of MasterCard’s to give our customers more options. All UBA cards are EMV cards with chip and PIN.”
He also pointed out that UBA was playing a dominant role in the internet banking space with U-Direct; a solution providing all account holders to their accounts. According to him, UBA has close to 600,000 subscribers with the adoption rate growing on a daily basis. “U-Direct is a secure web-based solution and gives users the freedom to access their account from anywhere. With U-Direct, customers are able to conduct most transactions available within UBA branches but without having to visit the branch.
“For UBA, we see opportunities because we want to provide solutions. What motivate us from an e-banking perspective are convenience, safety and security. Those are the watch word for us”. The above, the bank intends to achieve as customers and corporates embrace its self-service electronic banking channels namely: UMobile, PayManager, Consolidated Internet Payment Gateway (CIPG), U-Pay Connect, BankCollect. PayManager is UBA’s web-based electronic payment solution.
It is a web-based payment solution that enables e-payment to any third party (suppliers/vendors, customers, government, etc) locally and globally. With PayManager, customers can make payment from their account into accounts with any bank in the world. It also supports foreign currency payments and international transfer. On the other hand, BankCollect is a multi-channel is a web-based solution which enables collection or payment on behalf of government or corporate customers.
Payments such as Airline ticket payments, insurance premiums, subscription payments, utility bills, according to Balogun can all be managed on the solution. CIPG is UBA’s Internet Payment Gateway developed strategically to enable online payments on merchants’ websites. The web solution provides the simplest and quickest method of integrating e-commerce websites to a secure payment gateway for the purpose of receiving payments for goods and services. CIPG presents a combination of local and international payment options to merchant customers on a unified web interface.
First published on Business Day, Tuesday 24 January, 2012
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