By Fola James
The managing Director/ chief executive officer of Ecobank Transnational Incorporated, Ade Adeyemi has disclosed that his management would invest more in virtual banking platforms, rather than expand the bank’s branches across the country.
Adeyemi told Nairametrics that the bank is determined to use agency network and digital platforms as means of being able to distribute banking services to customers, which he said, are preferred method of delivering banking services to people as the brand going into the future.
According to him “Those are the things that informed our decision, and some of these branches were not profitable. Some of them were weak and that was the basis on which we made the decision to close those branches and merge their activities with some other branches that are existing in agreement with the Central Bank of Nigeria.”
He said the bank has contributed immensely to the efforts of governments in those countries, where it operates, in revamping the economy following the COVID 19 headwinds.
“We also understood that one thing is to have palliatives, the other is to make sure that the people are aware of what they need to do to be able to avoid catching COVID-19 in terms of radio, television and other awareness programme.
“Again, we participated in ensuring that, that is done, to be able to engage people to make sure they don’t contract COVID-19. The third thing was stepping back and working with our client because in the developed world the government was able to provide money to the corporations, the government was able to follow up, where people get paid for sitting at home.”.
“We also ensure that we work with the African Union around the concept of micro, small and medium scale enterprises, MSMEs where we usually put a lot of money aside to be able to support MSMEs across the continent. And we actually did training in these countries grooming a lot of people that will be able to have access to, not just finances but access to organisational structure and training.
“So all of those things were things we felt we needed to do as a player in the continent. And of course some of our governments wanted to put money in the hand of the poor and they didn’t want to give cash to them because cash became vehicle of transmission and we were able to quickly create accounts for those people and be able to transmit money into those systems.”
