Online Banking is Fractured

It all happened in Nigeria.
I’m a customer. A brand new customer.
I just got a new account because my old bank was pissing the day light out of me. Or maybe I just got a new job that requires that I open my salary account at a bank my workplace sold its soul to.
Enough rambling.
My account has been opened but I don’t want to come to the bank. Why should I? I’m not confirmed yet so I could kiss consumer loan a sweet 6 months good bye. I’m not in the mood to queue up. The tellers are tacky and I desperately yearn for the days when customer service officer was a pretty girl not the ones that could make a Boko Haram cower in fear when she opens her mouth to spew gunshots.
Ok. I need something, anything, that wouldn’t make me ever to come to a banking hall again. I mean, I could get my account officer to bring the mortgage forms to me over a lunch at Yellow Chilli. Some good things come with having a nice job.
I was nicely told I need a suite of e-banking services. Ahem! That’s OK. And what are those?
A separate form for internet banking. OK.
Another for SMS alert.
Another for Email alert.
And yet another for mobile banking.
Now, I’m almost losing my temper.
Why not a single online sign-on and one profile to rule them all? I mean, I see same emails on my browser, in the damned BB my company gave me, on my sexy iPhone, and even with SMS! Same username and password, life is good!
Apparently, most banks coupled these applications together from a basket of vendors. They don’t talk to each other. They don’t share profiles. They don’t even know about each other’s existence. I be damned!
When the banks get it right, let me know. As for me, I’m off to play golf.

Author: dejiolowe

Adédèjì is the founder of Lendsqr, the loan infrastructure fintech powering lenders at scale. Before this, he led Trium Limited, the corporate VC of the Coronation Group, which invested in Woven Finance, Sparkle Bank, Clane, and L1ght, amongst others. He has almost two decades of banking experience, including stints as the Divisional Head of Electronic Banking at Fidelity Bank Plc. He drove the turnaround of the bank’s digital business. He was previously responsible for United Bank for Africa Group’s payment card business across 19 countries. Alongside other industry veterans, he founded Open Banking Nigeria, the nonprofit driving the development and adoption of a common API standard for the Nigerian financial industry. Beyond open APIs, Adédèjì works deeply within the fintech ecosystem; he’s the board chairman at Paystack. Adédèjì is a renowned fintech pundit and has been blogging on technology and payments at dejiolowe.com since 2001.

3 thoughts on “Online Banking is Fractured”

  1. ones that could make a Boko Haram cower in fear when she opens her mouth to spew gunshots… lol.. seriously , have u really met any of those?

  2. ok.. i’ve read the article to the end now. and i have more to say. . i have always wondered abt those forms. frankly after i filled out my jamb form , i told myself i was done with filling any scary looking form. didn’t have much money then though but fast-forward to the salary acct days , with all those scary forms again. what exactly do e-business product managers do? dnt they get feedback, dnt they see the only reason ppl dnt use their buggy products (apart from the fact that they have bugs :)) is all those vintage forms they wearily pull out drawers when you request for one. ok.. i finally got around to requesting for an internet banking form, guess what i got? a very blurred form with words i couldn’t make out. that was it for me.i’m still internetbank-less

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