The Lion King | 11
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Milestones
U
nited Bank for Africa (UBA) is
named the best transaction bank
from Africa for 2014 based on the
strength of its entry and its clear demon-
stration of its improvements that it has
made to its transaction services.
The pan-African bank, which has oper-
ations in 19 African countries, has stead-
ily been improving its network across
Africa and has introduced a number
of solutions that make it easier for the
bank’s customers to manage and track
their transactions.
The bank has also been consolidating
its operations across Africa and put a
renewed focus on customer service,
and, like many transaction banks, has
been considering how best to improve
customer engagement.
U-Pay is an example of how UBA has
improved customer experience of mak-
ing payments. The solution is a salary
administration tool that removes the
manual processes and inefficiencies of
the systems that the bank’s clients were
previously using. The manual processes
were open to abuse, and one problem
in particular was that of ‘ghost workers’,
where non-existent people were added
to the payroll and the existing staff were
able to collect that ghost’s wages.
UBA’s solution to this was to introduce
U-Pay, a client-server-based solution
that automates the entire value chain
UBA’s Customer
Fulfillment Centre
(CFC)
comprises a
dedicated customer focused
team with staff working 24
hours/seven days a week to
ensure customer issues are
promptly resolved
UBA was the first Bank
to
introduce a Cheque Guarantee
Scheme known as UBACARD in
Nigeria, in 1986
With over
2,000 ATMs
and more
than 3,000 PoS
machines spread
across Nigeria
and the 18 African
countries it operates
in, UBA customers
are never too far
away from a UBA
service point
UBA has over 10
million customers
spread across its 19 African
countries of operations in Africa,
New York, Paris and London
in salary administration, which removes
the problem of ghost workers, reduces
errors and saves time for those process-
ing salary payments.
Another example of an improvement
is U-Collect, which enables custom-
ers – both large and small – to collect
payments online, in a way that the set-
up and ongoing costs of receiving card
payments are reduced.
Yinka Adedeji, divisional head of
e-banking at UBA, says that it is the
U-Direct Corporate solution that is UBA’s
most significant achievement. U-Direct
Corporate is the bank’s web-based
banking platform that enables small
and large companies to manage their
transactions more easily. The platform
has eight different functions – including
payments, collections, liquidity man-
agement and cash forecasting – all of
which can be accessed with a single
log-in and password.
“[U-Direct Corporate] has been well
received by the business community
because of the flexibility, automation of
manual processes, ease of doing busi-
ness and cost savings it offers the busi-
ness community across Africa. A unique
aspect of this product is the mobile
application that allows busy executives
to initiate and approve requests on their
mobile phones,” says Mr Adedeji.
Looking to the future, Mr Adedeji adds
Culled from ‘The Banker’
/
Transaction-Banking-Awards-2014/Transac-
tion-Banking-Awards-2014
that the business environment in Africa
is changing, particularly with cross-bor-
der business, because of security and
health concerns in the region. This, he
says, “will deepen the need to raise
efficiency levels of transaction banking
services in Africa in the rest of 2014 and
beyond”.
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