Nigeria’s premier bank, First Bank of Nigeria, has launched a new Digital Experience Centre in Lagos. Located at the very gates of the high-brow Banana Island, the centre allows customers to carry out all their banking activities digitally without any human interference.
The Banana Island Centre is the fourth of its kind with others in Abuja, Ibadan, and Victoria Island. According to the CEO of First Bank, Adesola Adeduntan, the Digital Experience Centres is all about weaving the bank into the very fabrics of the society in which it operates and being an integral part of that society.
While lauding Adewale Oluwatubo who is the General Manager of Biporal, the host of the facility for over a decade of mutually beneficial relationships, the MD also noted that the centre is intended to serve the high-net-worth individuals who are resident of the estate as well as anybody else who has access to it.
“What we are commissioning today is a world-class digital experience centre where residents and non-residents who have access to this highly prestigious estate be able to carry out their banking transactions without the need for human intervention. Whether it is to do transfers or to issue cards, whatever they want to do, it can be done without any human intervention,” he said.
Speaking on what it means for the bank, the CEO said the development keys into one of the bank’s key pillars which is to continuously exceed customer expectations through the deployment of technology.
“A key pillar of the transformation of the bank that we started about seven or eight years ago is investment in technology and the deployment of technology to exceed our customers’ expectations consistently. Specifically, we have been rolling out the digital experience centres where our customers can walk into a comfortable location of this nature, conduct or transact with us without any human interference,” he noted.
He said that the bank’s focus is to continuously delight its customers by enabling them to transact from the comfort of their homes. And, when they choose to interact by going to the branches, they should be given world-class environments and platforms to transact.
On what unique services the digital experience centre would offer that couldn’t be obtained using other technologies like the First Mobile app, the MD pointed out that one major activity which the centre provides is the issuance of ATM cards which he said takes only three minutes.
“So in this location and all other digital experience centres, you can issue a new card on your own and it takes three minutes. Whether you want to issue a Mastercard or you want to open a Verve card, we have the capacity and it takes just three minutes of self-service. We also have what we call the teller-cash recycler. If you want to deposit cash, either into your bank account or a third-party account, you don’t need to go to a branch. All I need to do is walk in here, put in my details, put in the details of the recipient, put the cash in there and the machine will count it and issue me with a receipt,” he said.
On his part, First Bank Group Executive for Technology, Digital Innovation and Banking Service, Callistus Obetta noted that at the core of the Digital Experience Centres is the commitment of the bank to continue to provide seamless personalized banking services to customers.
“The uniqueness of our digital experience centre is that it brings the best of physical plus digital and beyond just the automation that goes with it, as you can see, it is also to create a very welcoming ambient environment for our users, particularly in the communities where we do business.
Speaking about cybersecurity and forestalling data breaches, he noted that all of that has been designed into the offerings. He pointed out that most terminals require biometric authentication and the backend requires world-leading, cutting-edge security systems to ensure that customer funds are safe.
The bank also said it would unveil five more digital experience centres across the country by year’s end. It assured that the coming centres would be located at places where they would best serve a majority of the bank’s customers either resident or doing business in those places.
