Agency Banking in Ghana

Reaching the last mile to customers in rural area is always a difficult challenge for financial institutions and agency banking is a recognized and powerful channel to achieve it. For the Apex group in Ghana with a strong focus on providing financial inclusion to the most remote area in the country with their rural banks, this was an essential element to success. However, the heterogeneous nature of their operations created a unique technological and operational challenge to the definition of the architecture of this digital channel.

After a thorough analysis of their needs and structure and a wide consultation of their customer facing officers, we devised together with them a tailor-made architecture to address the challenges they faced and allow a streamlined and down to earth approached to the implementation of their agency banking strategy. By combining USSD technology with smart point of sales devices in a multi-tier approach, both in term of services as timed deployment, the strategy tackled the country network accessibilities discrepancies while capitalizing on their strong network of saving collectors.