FNB creeps further into Africa

By Siyabonga Africa, ITWeb junior journalist

Johannesburg, 03 Mar 2009

First National Bank (FNB) will open up its suite of cellphone banking solutions to customers in Zambia by the second quarter of this year. The services follow the bank's African footprint expansion plan.

“Whenever FNB opens in a new country, we now aim to include our cellphone banking solution as a part of the package,” says FNB mobile and transact solutions CEO Len Pienaar.

The bank has already established operations in Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland where various cellphone banking services, such as inContact, enable mobile banking for individuals and businesses.

FNB expects cellphone banking to become a default channel in financial services in the near future. The bank registers more than 2 300 new cellphone banking customers a day, it says.

Getting the message

“At FNB, cellphone banking has already surpassed our online banking solution in terms of the number of registered users,” says Pienaar.

FNB predicted it would have more than 1.2 million cellphone banking registrations by the end of January. Similarly, the bank's SMS transactions peaked at 4.7 million, in December, and totalled more than R600 million in value.

Pienaar says mobile banking adds to FNB's bottom line through customer retention, by reducing costs such as face-to-face queries, and through sales of digital goods and services which have associated fees such as prepaid airtime.

“Yet there is still a difference in terms of the volume and value of the transactions which our customers make using cellphone banking,” adds Pienaar. “Most of our registered mobile banking clients are using the solution to predominantly make cash payments and transfers, and a small portion buy prepaid through it.”

More banks join

“From observing the registration and usage numbers, 2009 will be the year in which cellphone banking develops serious traction in the market such that it is poised to overtake the number of Absa Internet banking clients this year,” says Absa digital channels managing executive Christo Vrey.

The bank announced in a statement it had registered more than one million cellphone banking users by the end of last month. Vrey adds there are more than 1.7 million logons to Absa's cellphone banking services each month.

The bank says it expects the adoption rate to continue growing rapidly as more and more clients become aware of the convenience of cellphone banking.