First National Bank (FNB) will begin offering cellphone banking in Namibia today, in partnership with the country's dominant mobile operator, MTC.
This will be the second country, outside SA, in which FNB will launch its cellphone banking channel, the company said in a media statement. FNB introduced cellphone banking in Botswana in December.
"Our efforts will focus on getting the cellphone banking mindset right by addressing customer concerns around ease of use, affordable access to the service, and safety. Through this exercise, we will turn improved market awareness of cellphone banking into customer behaviour that embraces cellphone banking as a convenient banking channel," says Len Pienaar, FNB Mobile and Transact Solutions CEO.
He says, in addition to the convenience, the bank will pursue a competitive pricing strategy as one of the key differentiators of FNB Namibia's cellphone banking offering.
The company says part of this strategy includes prepaid top-ups and free balance enquiries until the end of June.
Unlike the implementations in SA and Botswana, the system in Namibia will not implement an SMS offering, but will base the cellphone banking channel on unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) technology, says the bank. USSD is a global system for mobile communication technology similar to SMS.
Leonard Haynes, FNB Namibia's CEO, says while FNB's experience in running the cellphone banking channel in SA will put FNB Namibia in a strong position, the market dynamics in the countries are not the same.
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