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Business Reporter

Stanbic Bank Zimbabwe’s parent company, Standard Bank has been recognised as Africa’s Best Bank for Markets and Africa’s Best Bank for Wealth Management at the 2016 Euromoney Awards for Excellence, in London. In addition, Euromoney also named Standard Bank as the Best Bank in Uganda, (Stanbic Uganda) and in Zambia, (Stanbic Zambia).Sim Tshabalala, Chief Executive, Standard Bank Group said: “We’re delighted by these awards. We think they reflect our commitment to serving our clients with excellence both through our physical network in Africa and by linking Africa to markets and investors in the rest of the world.

Mr Tshabalala said that Standard Bank continues to position itself as the leading bank on the continent through its operations across 20 countries in Africa and in the major global financial centers. Having built strong in-country advisory and wealth management capabilities, Standard Bank is able to deliver a full range of universal banking services to its clients.

Regarded as the benchmark awards for financial services globally, the Euromoney Awards for Excellence are now in their 25th year.

Euromoney’s dedicated editorial team and awards panel rated all submissions on both quantitative and qualitative factors such as key performance indicators, financial ratios and innovation over the preceding 12 month period.

Meanwhile, Standard Bank, which is Africa’s largest bank by assets, has seen its mobile traffic growing 100 percent a year as customers embrace more convenient and efficient solutions for their banking needs.

During 2015, 825 million financial transactions worth R430 billion were processed through the banking app. As a consequence of this, branch transactional volumes have declined and ATM and branch transactions now make up less than 5 percent of total banking transactions.

Ninety five per cent of Standard Bank’s transactions are already electronic, making it a genuinely digital bank. Peter Schlebusch, Standard Bank’s Chief Executive for Personal & Business Banking says: “The vast bulk of Standard Bank’s Personal & Business Banking strategy to 2020 is about how we can use digital capabilities to deliver an even better customer experience. This entails putting customers in control, providing more convenience, and extracting key customer insights from our rich data so that the bank becomes more proactive, relevant and easy to use.”

Online and app banking has truly transformed the way customers engage with their bank, enabling them to bank on their terms whenever they want. Mr Schlebusch says Standard Bank has invested heavily in IT infrastructure to ensure that the bank has a single view of the customer, and the customer has a single instant view of their complete banking services regardless of geography, product or customer segment. The app includes the ability to open accounts online, move money across borders quickly and easily, trade shares internationally on29 stock exchanges and even lodge homeowner insurance claims off a single mobile device.