HNB cruises with mobile banking

M F Jabir

Rajendra Theagarajah, Managing Director, CEO HNB at the re-launch of HNB’s mobile banking proposition ceremony held in Colombo on Thursday said plans were afoot to convert at lease 15 % of its customer base into active mobile customers in the next two to three years.

Theagarajah said, sometime in 2010, soon as the end of the war, the bank’s top team relooked at the national vision, the national strategy and acknowledged it was time that they re-examined their own direction and strategy and to see whether they were also going in the same direction or whether there were gaps which prevented the bank from fully benefiting from the new found paradigm of prosperity.

He said the HNB has had a uninterrupted history of 125 years starting from its small and humble beginning with more than two million customers spread across the country and played a systemically important role by supporting every strata of society.The mobile proposition which was mainly confined to sms related banking was introduced eight years ago in the form of simple sms banking.And in that context the first thing they noticed was that the country had become connected specially due to infrastructure and road development.

“We believe with connectivity there is more movement and with movement there is more prosperity and economic activity not just in the Western province but throughout the country. We were also mindful that telecommunications was one of the most successful story of a previous state monopoly which has been privatized and the benefit transmitted to almost every citizen to this country.

Today we believe that for a population of 20 million there is almost about the equal amount of hand sets. We asked our selves where we are in this game. We found that some time in 2008 we had sometime like 2,000 sms banking customers for just under 2 million customer base.

While we had more than 5,000 points of sale machines across the country almost 750 ATM’s through a collaborative collective effort and almost 225 branches at that time and we felt that we are missing something. And when we look at the HNB’s sms journey we realized that in way back of 2005 we had just 279 sms customers which went up to about 1,500 the next year and as at the end of last year was still at a very modest 13,000, while our customer base is around 2.5 million.”

Theagarajah added that as a part of their 2012 revalidation of strategy the decision was taken to fully engage the Sri Lankan population into its economic activity and support that activity with the help of the mobile revolution where almost every individual had a hand set.

They had decided to enable that hand set into an inclusive proposition which gave that person access to finance and to grow the 13,000 base to at least 300,000.