With increasing numbers of customers beginning to embrace the suite of IT-driven business support services being unveiled by the commercial banking sector, local Scotia Bank Products and Marketing Manager Jennifer Cipriani has told Stabroek Business that changes in the banking culture will “sooner rather than later” transform the edifices that have long been the symbols of banking across the world.
According to the Scotia Bank official, Guyana could very well have “a different kind of banking in five to ten years.”
According to the Scotia Bank manager, what are often the imposing physical structures and elaborate service infrastructure that have become a symbol of contemporary banking could eventually diminish significantly even as the footprints of the new age banking culture continue to grow.
Jennifer Cipriani
The transformation, Cipriani says, is a manifestation of a changing service culture that is driven by the incremental infusion of information technology into the provision of banking services, an integral part of which is the focus on significantly reducing cash transactions and by extension the queues and extended waiting periods that customers often endure under the current commercial banking regime.
Movements in the direction of changing the face of banking have long begun to take place though some of those services are better subscribed to than others. While public advertising has been disseminating information on the virtues of electronic transactions, old habits are still hard to break.
But according to Cipriani, the bank’s customers are coming around. There seems to be no official haste to convert the country into a cashless society, but Cipriani says the Bank of Guyana has already been dropping broad hints in the commercial banking sector about the desirability of accelerating services that can effectively reduce the amount of cash in the system and by extension the cost to the public treasury of acquiring coins and banknotes to serve the money economy.
Meanwhile, Cipriani says the imperatives of both convenience and crime are inexorably pushing the business community in the direction of banking alternatives that circumvent the cash option. According to Cipriani, more than 200 merchants countrywide are accepting credit and debit cards while the major utility companies and insurance companies are also an integral part of the process geared towards the reduction of cash transactions.
The change, Cipriani says, is reflected in banks’ increasing investment in convenience-related technology. Scotia Bank itself is in the process of implementing systems that will increasingly reduce lengthy queues, as well as waiting time as customers become more aware of the virtues of embracing the services being provided by the bank.
