KPMG Urges Nigerian Banks to Improve Digital Capabilities

Dike Onwuamaeze

A recent study on the digital capabilities of the Nigeria banking industry carried out by KPMG Nigeria has revealed that most of the banks in the country lacked the ability to onboard a customer with end-to-end digital services.

The study, which covered 17 banks, discovered that, “85 per cent of them were unable to onboard customers digitally end-to-end.”

The 17 banks were Access Bank, Ecobank Nigeria, Fidelity Bank, First Bank of Nigeriam, First City Monument Bank, Guaranty

Trust Bank, Heritage Bank, Keystone Bank, Polaris Bank, Stanbic IBTC Bank, Standard Chartered Nigeria, Sterling Bank, Union Bank of Nigeria, United Bank for Africa, Unity Bank, Wema Bank and Zenith Bank.

It described ‘digital onboarding’ as a customer banking journey experience that spanned across account opening and customer profile creation on any channel of choice like mobile banking, digital lending, self-service and customer care services without requiring the customer to visit any branch to complete the process.

The report, which was unveiled during an online media briefing on Tuesday, by the Partner and Lead, Digital Transformation, KPMG, Mr. Boye Ademola, stated that banks need to improve their digital capabilities in order to deliver products and services via digital channels.

“From an industry perspective, we note that banks need to build capacity to transform user journeys by embracing design thinking principles, onboard customers digitally, articulate a pragmatic self-service agenda that will further reduce traffic at branches, reduce cost-to-serve and operational risks, embrace digital lending and digitize contact centres to cope with scale.