Stanbic Bank's virtual branch transforms retail banking in Ghana

Retail banking in Ghana has received a major facelift occasioned by investments into technologies that make banking easier for both banks and customers. Earlier this year, Stanbic Bank Ghana introduced its 41st branch – a Virtual Branch.

The virtual branch, unlike online banking, combines the speed, convenience and ease of use of digital banking with the personal human touch of the banking branch.

Stanbic Bank’s Virtual Branch presents the bank with a level of flexibility that enables its staff to provide customers and the public banking services wherever and whenever they need.

With Stanbic Bank’s Virtual Branch, customers can manage their accounts, loans and investments, transfer funds to their Stanbic Bank accounts or any other local bank, request for account modification, request for an ATM debit card or make a cheque book request.

Customers can also check their balance, get a bank statement, stop a cheque, stop a card or renew a fixed deposit account.

Other arrangements that customers can make include MoMo linkage, limit increase, password reset, username look-up, and set-up/registration and product/service enquiries.

Head of Customer Channels at Stanbic Bank, Eugene Ocansey, said the initiative is meant to strike a fine balance between online banking and the human touch to banking, which is critical to some customers.

“This is an initiative that provides human contact to digital banking and the flexibility it brings allows our staff to add digital interactions to handling walk-in customers.

The seamless customer experience this innovation brings across all channels makes banking a simple, convenient and simple process complemented by a human touch. This intervention is very timely especially in this COVID 19 period,” Eugene Ocansey said.

Stanbic Bank’s Virtual Branch allows staff of the bank to bring branch services directly to the customer through any internet enabled device, which in many ways streamlines the previously tedious and time-consuming transactions that characterize traditional retail banking.

The practice of prospective customers walking to physical branches to complete endless paperwork is replaced with bank staff going to the customer to gather information, scan identification into an app, and collect their signature digitally.

The entire process is paperless, making it faster, more efficient and more secure - not to mention the money saved in paper, printing, and shredding costs. The efficiency itself is another huge source of cost savings - no more time wasted in printing, copying, and scanning forms.