GTBank: Fundamental shift in financial services to enhance bank/customer relationship

Guarantee Trust Bank (GTBank) on Tuesday said that there was a fundamental shift in the creation and use of financial services.
The Chief Executive Officer of GT Bank, Mr Segun Agbaje, said this while presenting the Habari App to participants at the Social Media Week in Lagos.
According to him, the shift will enhance the future relationship between banks and customers.
He spoke on the topic, “One Africa, One App, Building the Bank of the Future’’.
Habari is a virtual kingdom made up of communities created by people of similar interests, where every activity earns users rewards they can redeem in the real world.
The core functionalities of Habari include; socialising, trading and sharing information.
He also added that Habari was their latest effort to help content creators that are also their customers solve issues around distribution band and payments.
“Banks in Africa have one fundamental challenge which is how to carter for the financial well-being of millions of people on the continent.
“The competition that exists for banks in the new competitive landscape, include anyone who can leverage the power of connectivity.
“Presently, everything disrupts, both telecos and other industries, creating room to enhance financial services in the banking industry,’’ he said.
Agbaje said that through the combination of powerful mobile computing devices and wireless connectivity, the digital revolution created an online world for search delivery that was as formidable as the physical world most businesses had built and invested in.
He added that organisations now had to rethink their business models to ensure that they are able to take advantage of the opportunity the shift online has created.
The GT bank executive said that in responding to the new competitive landscape, there was the need to leverage on technology, have a new business model for customer engagement, acquisition and service delivery.
He said that the way the app was designed was that it would evolve constantly, not a complete work because people’s lives keeps evolving.
“Disruption of apps have started and that would make the app do more than one thing, and the Habari app is structured for play, messaging, e-commerce and others.
“The bank has more than 15 million customers and we hope that with the introduction of the app, it will give the bank an exponential growth.
“Telecos and other organisations cannot disrupt us because we have an app that will disrupt others,’’ he said.
Agbaje said that the fundamentals of the ecosystem was an end-to-end customer experience, embedded digital innovation and going beyond the traditional understanding of financial understanding of financial information to become a critical enabler.
He added that for startups, Habari meant not having a structure, no advertising but having a platform to reach more people.
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