After a shift to a new core banking system to accelerate digital transformation and as part of its efforts to improve service delivery, Bank of Kigali is working on improving existing features on its digital channels and promises to release new features in the future. The upgrade has placed the bank among the lenders using the latest banking software. The New Times’ Alice Kagina caught up with Obinna J. Ukwuani, the Bank’s Chief Digital Officer to discuss where the bank is heading in terms of digital banking. Below are excerpts. What is BK’s long-term vision when it comes to digital banking? Our long-term vision is ultimately to eliminate trips to branches, making the lives of customers a lot easier, and to use technology to widen the variety of financial services that are available. To achieve this, it is important that we transition into an organization that is more digitally native by investing in human capacity which allows us to understand, manipulate and even build the technologies that we use to achieve our business objectives and serve our customers. Of course, that kind of initiative takes time, the transition can’t happen overnight and we are on our way. What digital products or services should BK customers expect in the near future? We are working on new channels, new products and features and more importantly, we are stabilizing some of the existing products and features such as POS payments, and enhancing our Internet Banking platform which was recently launched. More on that line, we are expecting to release a number of new channels that will make our bank competitive with just any other bank in the world, such as our new Mobile App which is in development currently. Do you think there will be a time when BK customers will be able to access all banking services without coming to the bank? Absolutely, and the day when customers will no longer need to come to a branch is near. Customers visit branches mostly to do basic transactions such as changing KYC information, international transfers and certain types of bill payments. The better and more reliable our channels are and the easier it is to access these features through digital channels, the less incentivized customers will be to come to the branch. I believe it will not take us long to get to that point. The percentage of the unbanked population in Rwanda is still high, what is BK’s plan to accelerate financial inclusion especially in rural areas? BK has attempted to do quite a bit in the past few years through our IKOFI program and moving forward we will integrate IKOFI more deeply into our traditional banking product line. For instance, as a bank’s corporate customer, you should be able to do a bulk transfer to farmers with IKOFI wallets which allows you to pay them and distribute benefits. Such integrations will make that possible and it will hopefully increase the uptake of farmers and corporate customers who use platforms like IKOFI to reach their clients. What reassurance can you give to customers who do not trust digital channels and still prefer the traditional way of banking because they believe its safer? I think it’s our job to make the experience with technology seamless, and we also need to make sure that it’s giving the value that we promise, at least then, users will have the incentive to use the platforms. I know that there is a lot of doubt on how secure digital services are, the fear of being hacked, especially for people who aren’t familiar with technology, and I would like to assure them that we have invested quite a bit to ensure the security of our platforms, thus the availability of many security layers between anyone and your finances. The security of our platforms is something we take very seriously. To mention a few measures in place, our platforms offer a user-generated password, such as the OTP and TOTP codes which change within seconds making it virtually impossible for anyone who doesn’t have the token generator to gain access to your account. Our systems are also able to track locations. If you are in Rwanda and you logged in today into Internet Banking and tomorrow you are in Malaysia, that would raise a flag and it would become more difficult to log into the account and so an investigation has to be done to validate if the login was legitimate. What would be your closing message to BK customers? Watch out, we are working very hard on a number of new services to customers that will be offered through technology. We are aware of the pain that customers have faced after the recent core banking system change and we are working really hard to stabilize the systems in order to offer our customers improved services than what they had before and of course this will come through our channels. We hope you stick around and if you don’t, we plan to give you a very good reason to come back.
