Business News of Wednesday, 4 October 2017
Source: First National Bank
2017-10-04
The service allows seamless transfer of money using mobile phones
The move to make payments simple and convenient is evident in First National Bank’s Geo Payment offering.
A Geo Payment is an electronic payment that enables customers of First National Bank to send and receive money when in proximity to other customers of the bank.
The service allows seamless transfer of money using mobile phones, without having to add the bank details of the recipient. All that is required is for the sender and receiver to be in the same geographical vicinity. It is safe, secure and the process is authenticated by means of the banking application’s existing programming interface, the Bank explained.
For a transaction to occur using Geo Payment, both the payer and the beneficiary need to switch on the location settings on their phones to identify the client to be paid and then they can make payments instantly without inserting any account details. The service is available to all customers of the Bank and comes at no extra cost.
The Geo Payments functionality has been used successfully in Ghana since the bank began operations about a year and half ago. It was, however, launched in 2012 by its parent company and is used extensively by its customers in South Africa and other countries where the Bank operates.
The Head of Marketing and Corporate Affairs at First National Bank, Delali Dzidzienyo, said in an interview, that Geo Payments is “a preferred way to send money instantly and safely once the recipient is in close proximity without the laborious process of typing long account numbers etc.”
He explained that the payment is instant between the accounts of the customers.
Mr. Dzidzienyo said “just the other day, a colleague and I went to a restaurant which does not accept card payments and I didn’t have cash readily available. Luckily, my colleague had sufficient cash to settle the entire bill and I instantly reimbursed him by transferring money directly into his First National Bank account using Geo Payments”.
“We want our customers to do whatever they want with their money without driving to our branches”, Mr. Dzidzienyo added.
He explained that the bank has given its customer a plethora of payment channels for them to choose from, depending on their need at each time.
“This payment option comes in handy when you need to buy or pay for something in cash but don’t have it readily available at the time, or you want to send money to a colleague or a friend, you just grab your phone and Geo Pay him or her. The sender or receiver will not pay any commission for the transaction and it works within a 5km radius. Geo Pay is just convenient and cool” he explained.
First National Bank prides itself with driving digital banking so that its customers will have little or no reason to enter a banking hall.
According to Mr. Dzidzienyo, First National Bank is riding heavily on technology and innovation to deliver modern banking to the public.
“We understand that consumers are more likely to own and use mobile devices and so we are only multiplying utility for the device they already have. The service is available on the bank’s App for iOS, Android devices and on BlackBerry devices.”
The parent company of the Bank in South Africa is one of the biggest on the African continent and has been in existence for 179 years and is the largest bank by market capitalisation listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange – Africa’s largest bourse.
First National Bank is leveraging off the experience and financial muscle of its parent company to excel in Ghana.
