Nigerian banks are still battling for relevance and leadership in the face of many economic uncertainties experienced in the country and the threat of cybercrime in their operations.
According to EY global banking outlook for 2018, 85% of banks see adoption of digital advancement as their superior priority and strategy to weather the storm in 2018 and beyond. Massive implementation of digital strategy will help the banks drive innovation, financial inclusion and turn in more profit to their shareholders.
All the banks in the survey see this as a priority that must be taken serious as tech is strongly disrupting everything including banking services.
According to, Dayo Babatunde, EY Nigeria Financial Services Sector Leader, “The pace of innovation continues to accelerate, and banks must have a strategy in place to ensure that their implementation of new technology is effective.”
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Besides that, this will help banks to protect themselves and depositor’s money from cyber thieves which have increased over time in the country.
This means that Nigerian banks must be technologically savvy or lose out.
The same report states that recruiting, developing and retaining key talent also garnered significant attention as banks strive to integrate cyber experts into their organizations in 2018 amidst a skill set shortage.
In this light, one of the key recruitment problems of Nigerian banks becomes that of recruiting qualified manpower. This poses to be a problem due to exportation of skilled man power.
Though a lot of Nigerians are doing amazing things in the diaspora, there are quite a few here who possess the required expertise to service these banks and help them in the implementation of their tech driven innovations and strategies going forward. According to surveys conducted by Rice University, Nigerian have the highest levels of education in the nation, surpassing whites and Asians
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According to EY Partner, West Africa Advisory Leader, Ben Afudego, few banks currently consider themselves as either digitally maturing or a digital leader, but more than half (62%) aspire to be one of the two by 2020.
If this is anything to go by, it means that Nigerian banks will be churning out valuable tech innovations that will help reduce the rate of financial exclusion in the country.
It also will mean that customers will experienced improved service delivery as tech will help make a lot of currently tedious bank transactions to become a whole lot easier.
In all, we will all hope and wish the banks luck as they play catch up with their counterparts in other developed nations of the world.
