Lamin Manjang, Chief Executive Officer of Standard Chartered Bank Nigeria spoke to select senior journalists in Lagos including IHEANYI NWACHUKWU. Excerpts:
Tell us about your role as the new CEO for Standard Chartered Bank in Nigeria. How would you describe your experience working across several markets in Africa?
I started with Standard Chartered in Gambia in 1999. Incidentally that was the same year we also commenced operations in Nigeria, so we are both celebrating twenty years’ anniversary this year. Having worked in Gambia for about three years or so, I then moved to Tanzania in 2002, stayed there for about a year in the corporate banking business and then in 2003 I went to Sierre Leone as the CEO there and since 2003 I have been CEO across multiple markets, before moving to Nigeria and West Africa.
So I am very delighted to be joining the team here. Nigeria is incidentally the biggest market for us in Africa. In absolute terms, Nigeria is a very strategic market for us.
In terms of your sustainability banking concept in Nigeria which includes SME and infrastructure banking, what is SCB doing differently?
Like you said, we are a commercial bank and that is our core function, which we will continue to engage in, to the best of our capability. However, beyond just a core function of banking, we also look at sustainability and for us sustainability is not something we see as separate from our core business, we believe that it is integral to our core business because when we do our core business, we are actually contributing to the overall economic development of the country. In terms of the pillars of our sustainability agenda we have now refreshed it to focus on three areas which are education, employability, entrepreneurship.
We believe that these three are critical in terms of enabling the future workforce especially the youths to be able to contribute meaningfully to economic developments. Once people are educated, either they get employed or they go into entrepreneurship. So we are looking at ways we can support all of these three pillars.
The recent announcement of our women in tech programme is to actually empower women entrepreneurs in the tech place because that is an area that is untapped. Generally, women are known for being entrepreneurs but when it comes to technology, you will find out that it is usually male dominated. So this programme was specifically targeted at women entrepreneurs, to take them through an incubation programme in partnership with Pan-atlantic University.
This is something that we have started in the United States about five years ago and then took it to Kenya two years ago, before launching it here in Nigeria.
In terms of the other areas on infrastructure or SMES, these are areas that the bank has the capacity to support. We have different units within the bank- there is a commercial banking division and a business banking division. In the commercial banking, we look at larger enterprises and the business banking we look at smaller enterprises and it is my intention to grow that portfolio in line with the desire of seeing more lending to SMES and more lending to the real sector.
When it comes to power, Standard Chartered is one of the biggest supporters of power Africa. Can you tell us how far you have gone with some of these partnerships? Especially because power has remained one of the greatest challenges in Nigeria
Across other markets, we have supported power projects. In Zambia for instance, there are projects we have supported there. As a commercial bank, it depends on the projects that we get to our table in terms of viability, the requirements of those projects, so we do have both financial and technical capabilities to be able to support those types of infrastructure projects but it depends on what kind of projects represented.
Coming from Kenya, we know that when it comes to mobile money on the global landscape Kenya is a model. What can we learn from Kenya to ensure that Nigeria can get it right in terms of mobile money?
I think M-pesa started as one of the most successful mobile money solutions that were pioneered in Kenya. Initially it was its ability to give out macro loans and collect the repayment that recorded its success.
For example, if you give a macro loan of a 100 dollars, obviously you have to have a system to be able to collect the payments for that loan even if it is 5 dollars a month, with less expensive processes to reclaim loans. That is how the idea of coming up with a mobile solution where individuals can pay macro loans using a mobile app was generated.
From that, the opportunities for people to make payments continued to expand. The good thing about the M-pesa was that at the time, the regulators were supportive, including the Central Bank of Kenya.
So I think that initiative, to be able to create space for the innovation to flourish is really what distinguishes Kenya from many markets including its high financial inclusion ratio of about 75percent.
Do you think these models should be Telco driven or bank driven?
For Nigeria it is going to be bank led because Nigerian banks are active.
Having been in Nigeria for almost 20years, would you say that your focus strategy has been successful? Especially in trying to bridge the gap in financial inclusion?
In terms of our strategy going forward we want to look at the retail business and how we can actually scale it up. We believe that investing in the digital banking space will give us that opportunity to wider customer base in our retail business, not necessarily in terms of where we are physically present but the opportunity to reach out to the clients across the markets. So I think going forward that is really what we want to focus on.
How do you evaluate your collision on international trade finance?
We are one of the strongest banks when it comes to international trades given our unique foot print as an international bank whose operation are primarily in Asia, middle east and Africa. You find that most of the trade flows today are between Africa and either Middle East or Asia, especially China and India and these are markets where Standard Chartered is very strong.
So for our clients that bank with us, it is usually a very seamless transaction. So for trade finance we are actually very strong. It is one of our areas of strong competitive advantage.
As the CEO, and with Nigeria being your biggest market in Africa, what are some of the challenges you expect?
I think the area of service is an area that we want to leverage on. We are in the service industry, so the whole customer experience, service space is something that we believe we should really step up and be distinguished for – equality of the service and equality to the products that we bring to the market.
We believe that investing in the digital banking space will give us that opportunity to wider customer base in our retail business, not necessarily in terms of where we are physically present but the opportunity to reach out to the clients across the markets
