Standard Chartered Ghana outperformed major local rivals such as Stanbic Bank and Fidelity Bank in areas such as digital, customer experience, and risk management to win best retail bank in Ghana in 2020. While lacking market competitiveness in its product stack in Ghana, it was voted among the best retail banks in digital channels in Africa and among the most helpful retail banks in its COVID-19 response in the BankQuality Africa Customer Survey
January 13, 2021 | Chris KapferStandard Chartered Ghana (StanChart Ghana) operates as a full scale banking player in Ghana deriving more than 30% of its bank revenue from retail financial services. Within retail, revenue is driven by deposits, loans, credit cards and wealth management. The bank commands a market leading credit card business in the upper segment with its Visa Infinite card and is unrivalled among its peers in the scope and depth of the wealth management business in a market with most banks offering traditional deposit accounts, as well as a limited number of investment products and services. By launching a full digital bank on mobile called the Standard Chartered Mobile (SC Mobile) in the first quarter of 2019 in line with a wider digital transformation in the African continent, StanChart Ghana started delivering on its digital agenda not just to future-proof its businesses, especially during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, but also to make digital banking safer, faster and more intuitive for clients.
Restructuring the financial service sector
Ghana’s financial services industry has gone through one of the fastest restructuring exercise of any African country in the last years. Between August 2017 and end 2018 the government cleaned up an unprofitable growth and stagnant sector by setting new capitalisation standards and closing banks or forcing them to consolidate. In total, it drastically cut back the number of financial institutions from more than 640 to 227 institutions with the numbers of micro lenders reduced by around 70% and commercial banks by a third to 23. At the same time a number of first tier banks implemented their next generation in core banking to power operations for retail and corporate banking. The industry returned to positive growth in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the digital t...
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