Access targets form one of the
charter’s cornerstones. Without access to basic
transactional banking services, individuals and
communities are generally cut off from other formal
financial services, including loan financing,
insurance, savings and investment products.
Mzansi BlueAccount
In October 2004, the Mzansi industry-wide initiative
to offer a basic savings and transactional product
to the unbanked in South Africa, was launched. The
objective is to provide 80% of South Africans in
the lower-income groups access to affordable, first-order
banking.
Our Mzansi BlueAccount offering generated an
enthusiastic response from customers and, by
year-end, about 90 000 individuals in South Africa
had opened Mzansi BlueAccounts through Standard
Bank, while the industry combined, had opened
more than 320 000 Mzansi accounts.
Standard Bank aims to open at least 310 000 Mzansi
BlueAccounts in 2005, while monitoring existing
Mzansi BlueAccounts to ensure that customers whose
transactional behaviour has become too sophisticated
for this type of account, are timeously migrated
to more suitable offerings.
Tactical service centres
Besides participating in the industry-wide initiative,
Standard Bank’s strategy is to provide an
innovative, new distribution channel in the form
of tactical
service centres to communities that have limited
access to existing branch networks. At the end
of
2004, 26 tactical points of representation were
developed, 19 of which were “bank in a box
sites” and seven bricks and mortar. Each
site consists of two sales desks and a Standard
Bank AutoBank
automated telling machine (ATM).
These facilities offer a wide range of products
from Mzansi BlueAccount to various branded Standard
Bank products, most notably EPlan, FuneralPlan,
ELoan, credit cards, current accounts, MasterCard
Electronic, home loans and investments. The first
26 tactical service centres were developed
in
the following manner:
- the first five service centres in more remote
rural areas to enable Standard Bank to increase
coverage;
- the next 14 centres in established urban townships
to improve densification; and
- the subsequent seven centres to ensure our
contribution to the charter’s access
targets.
Our objective is to experiment with different
ways of doing business so that we can evaluate
and better understand the commercial viability
of delivering banking products to communities
that have previously relied on branches in commercial
centres.
More information on our product offerings to
the unbanked is in the Customer
section.
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