eTranzact International PLC, which has partnerships with over 50 commercial banks and 350 microfinance institutions across Africa, said it believed that the future of banking in Nigeria is mobile.

The Company builds and facilitates mobile banking transactions through its mobile switching platform and has more than 12 years’ experience processing financial transactions in Africa.

At its recent mobile banking Masterclass in London, England titled “The Future of Mobile Banking Masterclass”, eTranzact announced changes in mobile banking architecture.

Speaking at the Masterclass, Mr. Valentine Obi, CEO of eTranzact reiterated that, “Mobile is the new online and eTranzact wants to be the bridge to drive the mobile evolution in Africa”.

“With Gartner Inc, the World’s leading information technology research and advisory company, predicting that the global mobile transaction market will be worth $721 billion and more than 450 million users by 2017,” Obi said “we saw a need to reimagine Mobile banking around the consumer’s lifestyle”.

“Understanding that Innovation done in isolation of customers’ needs and progress in consumer behaviour would lead to products that would easily be disrupted is key for us, as the world becomes smaller and global companies like Facebook, Whatsapp begin to take a closer look at the marketplace.

He said that the newly demoed Mobile banking architecture with new interfaces and touch points that will accelerate adoption and integration into consumers’ lifestyle.

New features were unveiled around onboarding, personalization, communication; introducing “person to person messaging as well as other.

Adopting a 360 degrees feedback process, eTranzact said they were able to get insights from the banks and in the next couple of weeks will be rolling out different improvements to our partner mobile banking applications.

The major goal of the Masterclass was to provide a platform to discuss new innovations in mobile banking targeted at making mobile banking more about the customer and launching new innovations to make the customer onboarding process easier.

Topics discussed ranged from how to improve the mobile banking experience for customers and innovations in providing support for customers, to unveiling eTranzact’s improvements in the onboarding process and mobile architecture of the mobile banking application.

With over 15million smartphones currently in circulation in Nigeria and with efforts by the OEMs to increase this number by making smartphones even more affordable, mobile banking adoption in Nigeria has also increased, leading to the need to scale up technology resources as well as think up new ways to make the process easy for customers, and eTranzact has been heavily focused on building the infrastructural backbone of what is required to take mobile banking to new heights.

Participants at the Mobile Banking Masterclass spoke extensively about some trends they had identified among their customers as well as possible ways they could improve the process.

Speaking about what the banks and their customers should begin to see immediately after the Masterclass, Obi said, “To us, every product we build is ultimately about the customer whether at the corporate or individual level, and we want to ensure that we are meeting their needs both locally and globally, pushing ourselves every day. We understand the part we play in the growth of mobile banking and payments as a whole and through constructive feedback from our partners and innovation; we want to continue to play this role now and in the future.

At eTranzact, we believe in using the power of technology to build bridges across continents and we will continue to invest in research and build up our capacity to achieve these goals”.

Also speaking about the milestones achieved by the company, Mr Adeyemi Adeyemo, Group Head, Business Development said;

“We are excited about the steps we have taken to improve the overall experience of our partner banks and for their customers. We have a key role to play in driving innovation and we are ready to embrace it.

We come with major improvements in the mobile banking applications for all our partner banks and hope we can begin to roll out the changes as soon as possible. The changes not only cover the user interfaces of the different banks, but also try to merge the user’s lifestyle and improve the signup process for the application.  We are also working with all our partner banks to help them enjoy the full capability of the USSD platform for mobile banking”.

As mobile banking becomes more segmented, the next step is to achieve greater personalization, and we want to make the user’s habits and needs focal points of the newly redesigned apps.

With our new onboarding process, we want to eliminate visits to bank branches so consumers can begin using mobile banking applications, while still maintaining the security of the platform”.

eTranzact’s effort in mobile began in 2003 long before mobile banking was introduced in Nigeria.

The team always believed that mobile would be at the forefront of payment innovation, and had a dedicated team working on research and development.

This led to pioneering research that kick-started the mobile banking sector in Nigeria.

The event, which lasted for five days, had in attendance various heads of e-banking and mobile banking from Nigeria’s top banks.  Members of eTranzact’s top management including its CEO, Mr Valentine Obi; ED, Business development, Mr Sullivan Akala; ED, Strategy and Corporate development, Mr Ike Eze; Group Head, Business development, Mr Adeyemi Adeyemo and other top management staff were in attendance.

eTranzact is Africa’s leading provider of mobile banking and payment services.

It boasts as the first fully operational multi-application and multi-channel electronic transaction switching and payment processing company that is publicly quoted on the Nigeria Stock Exchange.