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The interview takes place at her office on the 11th floor of the imposing Crested Towers building where Stanbic Uganda corporate headquarters are located.
Getting there earlier than the noon appointment on a Tuesday afternoon, I am asked to wait in the lobby overlooking the parliament of Uganda, the green serenity of Serena hotel and the Victorian architectural marvel of the UBC headquarters.
Thirty minutes past noon, Anne as she is fondly called by colleagues emerges from an adjoining conference room with the bank’s People and Culture head, David Mutaka, and half a dozen young persons with physical disability who cheerfully file out of the executive suite after what seems to have been a great meeting.
Noticing me waiting in the open lobby, she says hello with her signature smile and apologizes for the delay before quickly explaining that she had been meeting with young people who have just joined the bank under “our new ambitious inclusion agenda—where we want persons with disability to make up at least 10% of our total workforce.”
She quickly ushers me into her office across the lobby—a spacious square room devoid of personal moments hanging on the wall like most executive offices. The most noticeable feature is a large map of Uganda pinned on the wall, a clear reminder of the bank’s national footprint. Anne quickly settles into her seat and declares, “welcome to Stanbic Bank, let the questions begin!”
Rising to the top, leading through a pandemic—let’s start our conversation from March 1, 2020—when you assumed your current mandate as Chief Executive, the first woman to do so in the bank’s 116-year-long heritage. But you would have no time to celebrate the milestone as a pandemic was in the offing and required you to quickly acclimatise to the task at hand. Reflecting on the events of that month, almost three years later―what has it been like?
First of all, thank you for the opportunity to speak to the CEO Magazine’s readers. You have chosen to start from March 1, 2022, but allow me, for purposes of context, to take you twenty years back, which is when my banking career began. By the time of my appointment, I had spent nearly, half of that time with the Standard Bank Group and was privileged to serve in various senior roles in different markets including Uganda and Namibia. That experience enabled me to develop essential insights and valuable networks within the organisation and the industry to deliver on this mandate. For an organisation with many brilliant women professionals, I am honoured to be the first in our history and I don’t take it for granted.
It is also true that no amount of experience could have sufficiently prepared me for the unprecedented impact of the Covid-19 pandemic which created the need to throw out old rulebooks and usher in new ones in real-time. We had to evolve our thinking and approach quickly. Prior to January 2020, who would ever have predicted that a bank, our size could continue operating seamlessly with over 90% of staff working off-site and still meet customers’ daily expectations, without compromising shareholder value? Or writing off a whole year’s worth of interest revenue to an entire sector as we did for our schools, to support their post-pandemic recovery? Any such assertions would have been considered preposterous but look at us now living this very reality.
With that said, more than two years later, is it too early to talk about some of your achievements?
I think the first achievement is a shared one for all of us—we are both alive. Having lost many lives including some of our staff, customers, relatives, and friends, we must be thankful to be alive. During the heat of the pandemic, I would come to the office as often as possible which puzzled some people who knew I could work from home. But I needed to lead by example, taking the same risk that my colleagues working in the branches were taking as they were expected to show up for work every day. Of course, these were cautious risks as the organisation went far and beyond to protect our staff and customers.
Business-wise, the last two years have been about innovation and adapting to our new reality and a key achievement on that front is that while at it, we have managed to attain a double-digit compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) above 14% in our loans & advances and 13% in deposits; this is critical to the bank’s continued investment in innovative solutions for our customers and ensuring that we grow our shareholder value. This sustained growth is not accidental—it is a dividend from our commitment to our customers throughout the pandemic and supporting their recovery. For instance, we had to restructure a sizeable portion of our loan book because most of our customers’ business activities had been halted by the pandemic—these pragmatic decisions have paid off for us and I am pleased to share that today, our restructured loans approximately amount to only UGX 5 billion. We are proud of our customers’ resilience and are committed to supporting their growth ambitions going forward and through the economic cycles.
You say the last two years have been about innovation and adapting to a new reality; how is Stanbic Bank approaching this business re-orientation journey, especially dealing with emerging competition and disruptive fintech technologies?
American industrialist Henry Ford said, ‘the competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all but goes on making his own business better all the time.” That is what I am about—we don’t worry about the competition. Our focus and attention are fully on the customer of the bank, their evolving needs, transactional lifestyle, aspirations, and challenges and how we can partner to build solutions for them—this is our approach. For instance, today, operationally, we are a tech company with a banking license, because there’s nothing we can do without technology—this is not necessarily competition-driven but customer-inspired. That is why all our strategies are geared towards digitizing more and getting more and more technology into the lives of our customers, and their businesses.
As a result, today, less than 7% of our transactions are executed in our traditional branches and the number grows smaller and smaller every year. The bulk of our transactions, about 40% is handled through agent banking and the remainder is through various digital channels of which FlexiPay has the highest number of new users. Emerging technologies are also presenting us with the opportunity to take our services to more Ugandans hence deepening financial inclusion to segments previously underserved. With nearly half a million users, Flexipay is now a critical enabler of our financial inclusion effort, providing affordable services in a language understood by the target market, easily accessible and user-friendly. With FlexiPay, we are now digitalizing the SACCOs and Village Savings and Lending Associations (VSLAs)—which collectively serve more than 18 million Ugandans. We want to build their capacity to operate with efficiency, like ‘micro Stanbic banks’ in their localities around the country.
I like that you are not worried about competition instead you are focused on your customer but given the big shift towards digitalization and interoperability that comes with it, what is your attitude towards partnerships or even potential mergers in the future between say telecoms and banks e.g., Standard Bank and the MTN Group—would it be a surprise?
{Laughs}. The question of a future merger is definitely above my pay grade, but I can tell you that MTN Group and Standard Bank are already corporate partners, as is the case with many corporates whom we serve in this country. Stanbic Uganda is big on partnerships—again, customer needs’ inspired partnerships. If a customer wants a car to run their home delivery business, we partner with a car dealer to make it happen.
So, there is certainly room for partnerships, co-creation, and collaboration and not just with fintech, telecoms and other actors in the financial services ecosystem. For example, through APIs—applications programme interfaces between financial institutions and telecoms that seek to open up our own capabilities for others to use. Partnerships like these create great opportunities for bright minds to come and build the future that will drive Africa’s growth by finding homegrown solutions for the problems in Africa, our home.
An enabling regulatory space is required to apply and adopt emerging innovative technologies to spur these partnerships, would you say the sector here enjoys that?
Across the globe, innovation is always a step ahead of regulation and policymaking. People are in their garages, inventing things that the regulator can’t possibly know about. The innovation pace is usually too quick. However, I commend our regulators here, for their open-mindedness and transparency with which they approach innovation. For example, if you look at the National Payments Systems Act, it is one of the few legislations on the continent in which there is explicit accommodation of a sandbox environment—for experimentation. We have a progressive and transparent regulator open to learning and co-creating with the rest of the industry—in that sense, we are very privileged, because we can initiate and sustain innovation growth.
For instance, until recently, we were a “bank-only” business, primarily due to constraining bank regulation; the Financial Institutions Act, which limited our activities to core banking, for good reason. We have since taken advantage of recent regulatory reforms that allowed us to evolve our corporate structure to create a holding company which allowed us to provide both banking and beyond banking services. These include Stanbic Properties Limited—for real estate development, Stanbic Business Incubator—to build the capacity of local enterprises, SBG Securities—which is our investment banking arm, and FlyHub—focused on financial technology to help us disrupt from within and a key part of our journey to becoming a future-ready innovative bank that evolves with the customer. We are investing in technology-enabled capabilities and intentionally making them available to our partners and customers so they can leverage them in their own businesses to fuel their own efficiency and growth. These include Cloud computing capabilities, APIs as mentioned earlier and using our data engine to drive more objective decision-making at all levels of the organization.
Let’s talk about the girl-child—drawing from your own experience, what message would you like to send out to fellow women out there, especially those still in school or starting their careers?
There are many attributes required of a woman on the path to success, however, a few have been personally most pertinent and enduring. One of the most important attributes for which there is no substitute, is hard work. You must be willing to put in the hours and persevere. The second trait is integrity. Sadly, that is a scarce commodity, in our society. Quick things and back deals will get you somewhere, but they won’t keep you there. Being a person of integrity, and being known, to work and serve faithfully, is one trait that will set you apart. It doesn’t matter where you find yourself, if you are working hard, and you have integrity, it will eventually add up. The last attribute, and equally important is to keep learning—in the words of Stephen Covey, sharpen the saw. Whenever I am asked for advice to choose between two opportunities, I always ask, which opportunity is giving you a chance to learn more? Never mind the money, it is a derivative which comes at the end of the equation. Whatever your chosen career path is, you must strive for proficiency and continue learning.
Speaking of learning and hard work as essentials to career success—what are some of the unconventional skills that you are hunting for in the marketplace that young men and women out to be pursuing?
I will admit that, for decades, we were hiring candidates with business-related degrees—consequently, we have a large part of our talent base with a similar skill set. Now we are more about ‘future-ready-skills’ such as data analytics, robotics, process automation, behavioural science, creatives, and people good at communication and relationship management because ours is a people business.
You may be wondering what we are doing as a bank for the existing staff. The lazy approach would be to retrench and hire new staff with the required skills. Instead, we prefer a more pragmatic approach which is re-skill the talent we have. We are embarking on a serious investment in skills development, especially future skills, for our people. The average learning of a Stanbic Bank employee is at least 90 hours a year worth of future skills learning. Those who are rising to the occasion, are transforming themselves and I am pleased to share that over the last two years, we have promoted over 400 staff from within. We want to be a future-ready bank and we can’t be that if we are leaving our staff behind. They must come along with us. We are asking our employees- who are fairly young- (the average age is about 32 years) to rise to the occasion and move along with the changing trends.
In the pursuit of new future-ready skills, how are you ensuring that the bank remains inclusive?
That is a good question. At Group and country level, we have done well to empower women and facilitate them to scale the heights of corporate leadership—today, we have many mavens in different areas across the 20 countries where we operate, and we are proud of that work. As Stanbic Uganda, we have set our efforts on a new target—young people with disability. Our target is to have 10% of our total workforce to be persons with disability, which, if you take our current workforce of 1900 would translate to nearly 200 people in the medium to long term. And we have started. Since last year, we have made it clear in our job adverts, encouraging—in block letters, persons with disabilities to apply and when they apply, they have been given first preference. The young people you saw me meeting are the fruits of that effort, and we are happy to be providing a meaningful and dignified source of living for them and their families. As an industry thought leader, we hope this shall become a sector yardstick and we are happy to share our learnings so that we become a truly inclusive society.
Your last word?
To thank you and to reiterate our resolve, in the words of Allen Robert—that there is no failure, only feedback. Listening and solutioning for our customers is our full-time job and the motivation behind our continuous innovation. We acknowledge the challenging operating environment that we are in today, but in Chinese mandarin, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters representing danger and opportunity. That is our mindset at Stanbic—every crisis is an opportunity to positively impact our customers and be true to our purpose of driving Uganda’s growth, after all, it is our home.