After empowering female entrepreneurs who graduated from its initiative, called ‘WomenpreneurPitch-A-THON’, Access Bank has further extended its innovation to introducing a specialised payment cards for women.
The bank recently unveiled the new W branded debit card specifically targeted at women. “The Access Bank card for women is an innovation and the innovation is linked with identity and the identity is linked with women,” said Ajoritsedere Awosika, chairman, Access Bank.
“For us in Access bank, women are indeed very special; women contribute a great deal to our going forward and to the expansion of the business in banking,” she said.
Roosevelt Ogbonna, managing director/CEO, said the initiative was introduced as part of the bank’s mandate to empower female entrepreneurs with financial and business skills, adding that the bank has been doing this for the last four years.
The bank rewarded female entrepreneurs who emerged winners in its grand finale of W-Initiative’s Womenpreneur Pitch-A-THON Season four, with prices ranging from N500,000 to N5 million.
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Ogbonna noted that as an institution, it is not about making money but making an impact on the nation, saying the small and medium enterprises are the engine room of the economy.
“As the largest bank in the market, the largest bank in Africa by customer base, if we truly need to make an impact in the lives of the communities we serve, we have to start by making an impact on the small and medium scale businesses, understanding that they are the engine room for growth and will push through GDP growth across many markets,” he said.
He said across the world, a good 90 percent of SMEs control economic activity despite not being the largest businesses, but they control and they are the largest employers of labour about 60 percent. A good 43 per cent of them are owned by women. “So, we cannot leave women out of the conversation, while 67 per cent of them are owned by youths.”
Chioma Afe, group head, marketing and communications, who introduced the W branded debit card, said “the W-card is about empowering women, explaining that a survey was done on how women want to be differentiated, called and how they want to stand out in the market. That was how the idea around the female differentiated debit card was born, she said.
Launched in 2019, in partnership with the International Finance Corporation (IFC, a member of the World Bank Group), the Womenpreneur Pitch-a-ton program is the first women-in-business support initiative of its kind in the industry offered by Access Bank’s W Initiative.
The program in its maiden edition provided a free mini-MBA certification for 50 women entrepreneurs in Nigeria as well as financial grants worth N9 million to the top five applicants.
