Saturday, February 8, 2025

FNBB completes its five year strategy

First National Bank Botswana (FNBB) says it has reached a milestone following completion of its five-year strategy from June 2009 to June 2014, spearheaded by Lorato Boakgomo-Ntakhwana, the bank’s CEO.

Boakgomo-Ntakhwana said that the bank had a vision which examined the reason for it’s their existence.

She said FNBB existed to invest in its human resources, to be the best employer as well as be a customer-focused bank and good corporate citizen that seeks to leave a lasting legacy for its shareholders.

“We started first by crafting what we called the four stakeholders who are the most important people to the bank who we want to achieve the end results for,” she said.

Boakgomo-Ntakhwana said the bank focused on improving and fully engaging its internal staff, the bank’s customers, the FNBB board which is taking care of doing business under good corporate governance as well as the including the shareholders.

She said the bank managed its triangular model, which segments,┬áproducts houses and channels adding that the segment’s responsibility was to ensure that they take care of the customers.

The FNBB CEO said the product house was for innovative products within the bank.

“We had some very strong strategies that centred around balance sheet efficiencies, advances growth and this was before the market even woke up to the fact that there was a lot of opportunities in advances growth,” said Boakgomo-Ntakhwana.

She highlighted the FNBB diversified its credit book and made sure that they well represented across all areas of the society and added that they managed to focus on the margins and made sure that they properly priced for the risk that they were taking on board.

“We made sure that we set up proper collections structures to the new risk taking initiative that the bank embarked on,” she stated.

She said the bank also looked at the holistic picture and decided that the number of customers they have, they can still grow quite significantly.

She added that the FNBB looked at its customers and realised that a lot of their customers had only one of the bank’s products, adding that the bank wanted to make sure that the products penetration is quite strong to the bank’s customer base. She said the bank also diversified into noninterest income as well as innovation.

“We have the largest network of ATMs and point of sale machines and today we are the number one bank in the country,” said Boakgomo-Ntakhwana.

She also highlighted that growth in customer numbers from the beginning on the strategy doubled to 430 00, adding that the growth rate for e-channel was 19 percent. She said regarding the bank’s balance sheet trends, the bank had either doubled or tripled since the beginning of the journey.

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