The Stanbic Bank Head of Digital and Innovation, Estelle Jacqueline Asare, has called on banks to leverage the strengths of complementary partners and increase their investments into new agile technologies in their bid to accelerate digital banking.

This, she said, will enable banks to provide their customers with more personalized experiences and entrench loyalty. Ms. Asare said this when she joined a group of experts to discuss digital banking trends at the West Africa Digital Leaders’ Summit held at the Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City, Accra.

Sharing insights on a panel discussion on ‘Making End-to-End Digital Banking a Reality,’ Estelle Asare highlighted the importance of banks adopting a customer-centric approach, learning from Fintechs’ agility and innovation.

She noted that “Customer centricity and Agility is what is driving fintech growth. They focus on customer needs and pain points, how fast they can resolve them and provide convenience. It is important that banks learn from them to enable the provision of better digital services.”

“If banks want to innovate and survive, we must look at how to partner with complementary service providers and leverage each other’s strengths. As banks, we need to consider how we integrate using APIs and create open banking platforms to support the entirety of the customers' lifestyle and life journey. Integrating with platforms that enable us to harness data, allows us to provide hyper-customization to our customers and that is what makes them stick with us. Harnessing all of that to provide targeted offers to our customers will be a game changer for banks,” she added.

Ms. Asare further underscored the importance of securing systems and mitigating risks in the evolving landscape of digital banking leveraging cybersecurity and enhanced biometric verification. She mentioned that “The growth of digital banking and AI calls for heightened focus on cybersecurity. If we don’t keep our eyes on the risks and ensure that the bank is secure, we will end up losing more than our digitally active customers. We will lose the bank itself.”

The West Africa Digital Leaders’ Summit event was organized by technology firm, Temenos. The event brought together specialists, experts and industry leaders to interact on various topics including exploring digital banking trends, leveraging cloud banking, opportunities and trends in the payments sector and how digital transformation can increase revenue and grow a bank’s customer base.