Why I’m Excited About Diamond Bank’s Mobile App Strategy 

Nairametrics| The Managing Director of Diamond Bank, Uzoma Dozie has said that he is targeting about 8 million new customers by the end of 2018. His strategy? Diamond Bank Mobile app.

He noted for example, that Diamond Bank was able to grow its customer base by 50% in two years, not by opening additional branches but through its mobile banking services.

Here is an excerpt of his interview with Vanguard.

How it has helped increased customer base.

“We have about 12 million customers. The first six million took us 23years and 300 branches. The last six million took us two years and no branches, no account opening fonts. It was all mobile, so we are taking advantage of the millions of mobile phones people are actively using in Nigeria to now use that as a platform to deliver banking and beyond banking services. ”

He also explained how he hopes to use he mobile app to achieve digital adoption.

 “Here on our Diamond mobile we communicate with our customers cost effectively. So if anything happens, in services like that, we push that information to them at least. It is not an email but it comes on the screen. So that is one way they see it and they absorb the idea. The more people become digitally enabled the easier it is to give them information especially information on a benefit.
“For instance if we are having a promo at a place like Shoprite, all our customers when they get to that vicinity they see information saying we are having a promotion in this particular store. That is just a way to help our customers. So why do you bank with Diamond bank? It is not because of banking. It is because Diamond bank moves customer to me as well. Which is why when customers ask me what is it you can do for me? I don’t talk about banking. Everybody can do banking. It is how I help you achieve your objectives as an organization.

“That is also tied into the shares of life. It is not about the share of money. Share of money is transactional. How much money can I make from you? Share of life is that we are in this journey together

As you may have guessed, I love the Diamond Bank mobile app and I think it’s one of the best around. It’s also fascinating hearing him talk passionately about how he hopes to use digital technology to drive his business. The Bank’s 2016 9 months results showed deposits rose 13.6% to N1. 4 trillion. Savings deposits of N428b also represented 30.5% of customer deposits compared to 27.7% a year earlier. GTB for example had a savings deposits  of N432b in the same period and represents 21% of customer deposits.

I still worry about Diamond Bank’s huge non performing loans and they haven’t demonstrated a clear strategy to improve it. 9 months results was a 79% drop in pretax profits largely caused by loan losses. We’ve been very critical of the banks management and still have strong reservations over the way it handles risk assets. However, their mobile strategy is spot on and hard to fault.

A mobile strategy targeting cheap deposits should help ease interest expense on customer deposits, which already dropped by  33% YoY to N20.6b as at September 2016.  Despite my excitement about the mobile app the stock remains off limits for me.