Ecobank Launches Ecobankpay Zone

By Kingsley Asare

Ecobank Ghana has launched the EcobankPay Zone in Osu to help the public access financial services with ease.

With the launch of the EcobankPay Zone on the Oxford Street at Osu at the weekend, customers and non customers of the bank could access financial services as well as buy things from EcobankPay partners and Xpress points along the Oxford Street and pay electronically.

Speaking at the launch, the Group Executive in charge of commercial banking at Ecobank, Josephine Anan-Ankomah, said the move formed part of the bank's deployment of digital banking to bring banking services closer to customers.

"Ecobank's vision is to decentralise banking, where customers can access banking at the comfort of their homes or any location, without physically coming to the bank," she said.

Mrs Anan-Ankomah said Ecobank was currently focusing on leveraging digital and mobile technologies to bring banking closer to customers.

According to her, banking currently was no longer "brick and mortar," but digital where customers could sit at the comfort of their homes and access banking services.

Mrs Anan-Ankomah explained that it was in that line that the bank introduced mobile banking, Ecobank Xpress Point and recently introduced EcobankPay, where customers could "buy, scan and pay" electronically without cash at any EcobankPay or Xpress Point.

She said Ecobank currently has more than 250 EcobankPay merchants along the Oxford Street and 15,000 across the country, where customers could buy from them and pay electronically without cash and about 2000 Xpress points to enhance the ease in accessing banking services.

The partners, Mrs Anan-Ankomah mentioned include Somotex, Shell, Papaye, Woodin, Legacy Coconut, and African Artifact Trading Hub.

The Group Executive Commercial Banking said currently, about two million customers had embraced the Ecobank digital platform.

The Regional Head of Transaction Services Group, Stephen Kemetse, highlighting on the EcobankPay platform said it was also a platform for Small and Medium-Scale Enterprises to receive payment for their sales.

That, he said, was to address the situation of SMEs partners holding bulk cash which was very dangerous due to the activities of robbers.

Mr Kemetse said the system helped the EcobankPay SMEs partners to deposit their daily sales electronically with the bank.

Mr Kemetse said the intention of the Ecobank was to "leave no one behind," in accessing banking services in the current digital technological age.

The Head of Consumer Banking in charge of Anglophone West Africa, Tara Squire, said Ecobank was building a "proper ecosystem that propels better digitisation".

He explained that the intention of Ecobank was not to compete with the telecommunication companies, but complement what they were doing and make banking services easily accessible by the public.

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