NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 8 – Eclectics International, a Kenyan owned Fintech company, has been commended for successfully developing and deploying a proprietary Shared Agency Banking Platform in Uganda, the first in Africa.
A Shared Agency Banking Platform adopts an approach that allows several financial institutions to share agency banking infrastructure and technology to serve the customers.
Launched in May 2018 as an initiative between Uganda Bankers Association and Bank of Uganda, the initiative aimed to expand financial inclusion by extending financial services to the under-banked and unbanked population, mostly in the peri-urban and the rural villages.
This effort saw the number of bank account holders in Uganda increase from 7.4 million in 2017 to over 13 million by January 2021.
The Shared Agency Banking Platform was recognized by the IFC and the World Bank as a first in Africa. It has also been rated as the Best Regulated Agency Banking Platform in the continent.
In Uganda, the Eclectics Agency Banking Solution now powers over 1 million monthly customer transactions of more than USD $160million monthly. These include Cash Deposits, Withdrawals, Bill Payments, School Fees Payments, Social Security & Local remittance fees.
Paul Mbugua, the Group CEO and Founder of Eclectics International, explained that Shared Agency Banking is the use of technology to enable the banked, under-banked and unbanked population to access financial services using a shared platform. In this case, instead of each bank in Uganda deploying their own exclusive agency banking platform, they opted for a shared platform.
An application is installed in one central place and use common physical infrastructure (servers, power, network and devices), which in this case, the POS terminals, or mobile phones are used by bank agents distributed across the country.
This means that any bank customer from the 24 commercial banks in Uganda can visit any agent and enjoy financial services such as cash deposits, cash withdrawal, account opening, transfer of funds, cash bill payments among others.
Each of the 24 banks has an agent banking transactions and system monitoring portal, executive dashboard, analytics and comprehensive reports.
Highlighting the magnitude of the project,“Just to give you a highlight, the overall project was to integrate the Shared Agency Banking Platform with the Core Banking Systems and switches of each of the 24 banks. Integrate to almost a similar number of Card Management Systems and integrate also to the Telcos. In each of the four Telcos, we had to integrate with their; USSD platform, […]