Awards for Excellence 2017
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This year’s award for best bank transformation in Africa goes to National Microfinance Bank of Tanzania, a bank which has become a model for other African institutions in the areas of mobile banking, SME lending and microfinance.
When NMB was split off from National Bank of Commerce and privatized 12 years ago, it was predominantly a “payment factory for government payments”, in the words of the bank itself. It had around 100 branches, a very small loan book and about 600,000 customers, mostly government employees.
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Ineke Bussemaker, |
With support from Rabobank, the largest shareholder in NMB, which has been providing technical and managerial assistance since 2005, and support from the other large shareholder, the Tanzanian government, the bank’s management have made NMB the biggest, best and most profitable bank in the country.
It had no ATMs 12 years ago, today it has over 650. The bank expanded from 100 to over 189 branches and has invested in working through agencies, known as wakalas, to be as close as possible to its customers. Today it has over 2,000 wakalas, which the bank intends to grow to 7,000 over the next four years.
Twelve years ago, internet and mobile banking did not exist. Today all of the bank’s customers can use mobile banking, provided they have access to a mobile phone, which most Tanzanian adults now do. NMB is also about to launch a new product that enables customers to open a bank account from their phone without going to a branch. The account number in this case will simply be the customer’s mobile phone number.
NMB’s customer base has grown from 600,000 to 2.5 million customer accounts since privatization. That NBC, the bank NMB split away from in 2005, has fared far worse that NMB is another testament to the turnaround story achieved by the bank’s management.
