KAMPALA – Bank of Africa has on Friday, December 13, 2019, rewarded its oldest customers.
At a breakfast meeting at the bank’s head office in Kampala, the Managing Director, Arthur Isiko said, the bank felt it necessary to honour its first and longest customers who trusted them at a time when many could not go for indigenous banks.
The reward comes in the wake of the bank’s customer service week.
The clients were celebrated in two categories including the oldest and active customers who have been with Bank of Africa since 1990 and the top five Mobile Wallet users.
We spoke to one of the winners, Joseph Efata who was appreciated for using the bank’s digital services including the E-wallet.
Mr. Efata commended Bank of Africa for celebrating its customers, noting that this initiative undertaken by the bank will always be remembered.
He urged the bank’s management to keep up the good work in the continuous improvement of its digital products and services.
Meanwhile, Mr. Isiko a seasoned banker, who handed over the envelopes and Christmas hampers, said Bank of Africa sees this period as an opportunity to remind its customers of the bank’s continued commitment to serve them and to also thank them for their loyal custom over the years.
He reemphasized the bank’s commitment to providing modified financial products, backed by digital transformation and massive investment in the education sector.
“It is in this direction that the bank is making every effort to upgrade all its digital platforms to ensure that customer needs are met always. We will continue to improve our services. Our digital products are there to make banking convenient, accessible, less costly and easy to use,” he said.
Since inception in 1990, he said: “Our aim has been to help clients grow by offering excellent and affordable retail and corporate banking services”.
The Bank has since transformed from using 1990 ledger books while paying attention to industry-changing trends including heavily investing in education and technologies to enable customer convenience.
Some of the new technologies are Internet Banking, an information system that allows customers to perform banking activities anywhere, via the internet. The bank also has USSD codes for non-smart phone users.
“Our internet banking platform enables customers to perform all routine transactions, such as account transfers, balance inquiries, bill payments, and stop-payment requests. Account information can be accessed anytime, day or night, and can be done from anywhere,” he noted in an interview.
Today, he said, if you’re a parent you can pay school fees for all schools on school pay platform.
“We want to improve the bank’s investment to 10% from the current 6%. We have granted over UGX30b just to the education sector,” he said explaining that this money has gone to people who putting up, renovating or buying equipment for the school.
He said the bank is interested in the sector because the country has a very young population that needs quality education.
Bank of Africa started its operations in Uganda 34 years ago as a small deposit-taking private company then Sembule Investments.
In 1991 it grew into an investment bank. Later in 1996, it was granted a commercial banking license as Sembule Commercial Bank.
Almost a year later the Bank secured co-investors who recapitalized the Bank and rebranded it as Allied Bank international. It was run under this arrangement until December 2006 when Banque Belgolaise one of the investors divested its ownership to Bank of Africa SA an international banking consortium.
