No African lender can match Ecobank Transnational’s reach. The Togo-based financial institution is a worthy winner of this year’s award for Africa’s best bank for small and medium-sized enterprises – the second year in a row it has received the title.
For Ecobank, which serves clients in 33 sub-Saharan Africa markets, SME services are part of its wider commercial banking platform. In the full year 2022, gross loans to commercial banking customers totalled $1.8 billion, up 14% on an annualized basis, with net loans up 24% to $1.7 billion and customer deposits up 13% to $5.4 billion.
Ecobank continued to expand its reach with Ellevate, a platform first unveiled in 2021 that extends financial and non-financial support to women-run, focused and owned African businesses. The award-winning programme onboarded around 50,000 new customers last year, extending loans worth $179 million and drawing in deposits worth $445 million.
“Across our markets, female entrepreneurs can benefit from non-financial support such as leadership programmes, business skills training and networking opportunities,” says Carol Oyedeji, acting group executive commercial banking at Ecobank Group.
Omni Lite, the commercial banking division’s internet banking platform for SMEs, onboarded 68,000 new small business clients in 2022 and processed transactions worth $4.9 billion, taking the total number of customers to 248,000. The number of merchants that accept EcobankPay, its digital payment collections platform, jumped 30% last year to 464,000.
Another new service, RapidCollect, which was unveiled in September 2022, is a regional collection scheme that helps clients receive payments using local currencies from clients in each of Ecobank’s markets – at a lower cost, the bank promises, than any other cross-border offering.
The service, notes Oyedeji, “provides SMEs with an innovative, secure and fast collection solution leveraging the strength of our pan-African network.”
That makes it easier for SMEs to process cross-border payments within Ecobank’s network. In just the first four months of operation, $431 million worth of transactions were processed via RapidCollect. Ecobank also boosted its number of XPress Point agencies – which are typically run by SMEs, providing vital banking services to local communities – to more than 110,000 at the end of 2022.
Ecobank regularly rolls out new services catering to the needs of smaller companies. During the awards period it partnered with MasterCard Farm Pass, a service that connects farmers directly with buyers, empowering them to negotiate the best price for their produce – thereby digitalizing agricultural supply and value chains.
Across our markets, female entrepreneurs can benefit from non-financial support such as leadership programmes, business skills training and networking opportunities
Carol Oyedeji
Farm Pass is being rolled out across Ecobank’s network, with the aim of helping millions of smallholders gain digital access to markets, financial services and real-time pricing information.
Another highlight is the bank’s Training for Financing programme. Developed by the Ecobank Academy and aimed at SMEs and micro-sized firms, it helps business owners learn how to budget, manage risk and cash flow, and sell online. More than 4,300 SMEs have now participated in the programme.
In March 2023, the bank also partnered with Visa to provide SMEs with access to a set of learning modules developed by the payments firm. The resource enables participants to learn how to manage their finances and employees, and promote their business on and offline.
Also of note is the bank’s financial literary campaign. This is a set of learning modules, the first of which, ‘Preparing SMEs for the capital markets’, was launched last year and has so far attracted around 3,500 participants.
