The Lion King | 15
Ask the Executive
T
he strength of a bank’s IT platform has become the
strongest competitive tool in the banking industry globally.
Given the importance of IT in creating a competitive ad-
vantage, the people who make the decisions and advice on
the bank’s IT strategy, play a very important role. At UBA, the
man who plays that role is Rasheed Adegoke, a consummate
IT professional with over 23 years experience covering IT, Man-
agement Consulting, Banking Operations and Strategy.
He is responsible for the development and execution of UBA
Group’s IT Strategic Plan with the mandate to ensure full con-
vergence of IT and business goals in realizing UBA’s Project
Alpha objectives.
Rasheed had previously worked in the Strategy and Business
Transformation directorate of UBA where he led the estab-
lishment of UBA’s Group Shared Services between February
2008 and January 2009 for which he bagged the CEO Award
in December 2008. In the last 15 years, he has worked as a
Transformational CIO in various top Banks.
He graduated from the University of Ibadan in 1990 with First-
Class Honours and a merit award as the best graduate in the
faculty of science. He also holds an Executive MBA from the
International Graduate School of Management (IESE), Univer-
sity of Navarra, Barcelona, Spain.
A professional Fellow of both the Nigerian Computer Society
(FNCS) and the British Computer Society (FBCS CITP), a mem-
ber of the Nigerian Institute of Management and an Honorary
Member of the Chartered Institute of Bankers, Rasheed has
also served on the Presidential committee on National Broad-
band Strategy and also on the Techlaunchpad committee
setup to encourage software entrepreneurship by the Federal
Ministry of Communication Technology.
In this interview, he speaks about his passion for IT and the
drive to sustain UBA’s cutting edge in IT.
Given the changing and dynamic
nature of the IT industry, how do you
ensure that UBA always remains ahead
of competition and up to date in its IT
infrastructure?
At the institutional level, we have a
function that is responsible for innova-
tion management - researching, spot-
ting and analyzing trends, and manag-
ing pilot or proof-of-concept projects.
Personally, I recognise that one of
my roles is to be the Chief Innovation
Officer of the Group, so I constantly
research trends and new solutions via
a number of channels including books,
newsletters, subscriptions and member-
ship of professional networks. My inter-
ests are usually not limited to IT or the
financial service industry as sometimes
new trends that ultimately influence IT
or affect the financial service industry
technology space originate from other
spheres of life or industries.
What, in your opinion, are the factors
driving the growth of e-commerce?
The big drivers of the current change in
consumer lifestyle and shift to e-com-
merce are the combined factors of
demographic shift (Gen-Y are more
comfortable with technology), easier
access to technology including mobile
devices, increasing reach and af-
fordability of broadband services, the
increased security and trust of e-chan-
nels and the boom in applications that
leverage e-channels.
What role are you playing in supporting
the bank’s capacity to drive e-com-
merce in Africa?
Information Technology is the bedrock
of banking success because bank-
ing really is the business of managing
information. Realizing this and with the
growing adoption of e-commerce, we
have worked with E-Banking to deliver
platforms that enable us lead in the
e-commerce space. These include:
U-Bills, U-Mall, U-Mobile and U-Direct.
We have also developed a web-pay-
ment gateway that can be integrated
with customer's e-commerce platforms
for UBA to acquire their transactions
and we are in the process of releasing a
social media banking platform leverag-
ing Facebook.
Most importantly, we continuously
monitor e-commerce trends, so we can
be at the forefront of adoption without
being at the bleeding edge. All these
are in addition to support for service
improvement and growth in tradition-
al channels, such as ATM, POS and
branches.
In what ways do you think IT will change
the future of banking in Africa?
I will answer this from two perspectives
– one from the structure of the banking
industry and two from the nature of
banking services.
In terms of the industry structure, I
believe there will be regional consoli-
dation of the industry as cross-border
competition increases between the
major regional banking groups. For ex-
ample, I expect Nedbank and Ecobank
to go further in their alliance to exe-
cute a full combination. There will be
similar M&A transactions as sub-regional
players seek to expand their reach into
new regions or regional champions like
First National Bank (FNB - one of South
Africa’s big four banks) seek entry into
other regions to become pan-African
players.
On the nature of banking services, IT will
continue to be the engine room of fu-
ture innovation in banking not just in Af-
rica but across the globe. In the future,
technology will significantly transform
or disrupt the core nature of banking
services subject to what regulation will
permit.
In the near term, there will be a major
disruption of the payment ecosystem
and technology companies like Apple,
Microsoft and Paypal will implant them-
selves more into the payment ecosys-
tem. Banks that will survive this shift will
not be the ones banking on regulatory
protection but those that rethink their
intermediation role in the payment
ecosystem and work actively with the
technology companies to bring about
the "new normal" that will emerge.
Long term, I think we are headed
towards the digitization of money. Per-
haps that is still one or two generations
away but this would be an era where
