First Bank: Our ATM processes 5000 transactions every minute

First Bank of Nigeria Limited says its automated teller machine processes 5000 transactions every minute.

Adesola Adeduntan, managing director of the bank, said this at a breakfast meeting with some journalists in Lagos during the week.

He said the bank has set up a digital laboratory in order to be in the forefront of innovation.

“Every minute, out ATM processes 5000 transactions. If you count, in Nigeria we have processed more than 100 million transactions per month. I mean, we won that award several times,” he said.

“We are a significant financial transaction processing platform as far as the economy is concerned and that’s part of where we derive our systemic importance from because we do process a very big chunk of what goes on in this market.

“We strengthening our operation in terms of the market offerings… we want to be in the forefront of market offering.”

Adeduntan said under his watch, the bank strengthened its partnership with other organisations.

“Researching it, developing it ourselves, but more importantly we also created a platform for partnership and collaboration with other FinTechs,” he said.

“The data protection policy in the UK, we are fully aware of that. It is an ongoing work on how to ensure full compliance.

“Again, what we have done successfully is that we have raised awareness, and we have also raised the consciousness of the entire institution around conduct and compliance over the last two years, so that is very important for us.”

Responding to a question on how steps taken to check fraudulent practices in the banking sector, he said: “I can only speak for First Bank where we have strengthened our credit governance process and that would not happen under our watch, given what we have done.

“We also spoke here today about ensuring our digital platforms are safe and secure- those are the kind of things that we use to attract people. When I spoke about what we are doing in our corporate banking, and our commercial and public sector, I used the phrase ‘we are embarking on what we call retailisation of corporate banking and public sector banking’ which means ensuring that we will bank the corporate and we will also find a way to bank their staff, their workers, their vendors and everything. So. those are the things we are doing.

“But agency banking stands out clearly, our push around innovation I mentioned earlier that in 2017 alone, we processed more than a trillion transactions on our USSD banking platform and that was quite significant.

“We are also innovating around ATM’s- what you can use ATM’s to do. There are a number of things are in progress.”