Acquisition boosts plan

The National Business

KINA Bank’s acquisition of ANZ PNG’s retail, SME and commercial business last year significantly accelerated its five-year strategic plan, according to the Kina Securities Ltd 2019 annual report.
It stated that it involved a full-scale 15-month programme building out of its retail, commercial and transactional banking capabilities.
They included:

  • gaining Visa, MasterCard and China union pay acquiring capability;
  • becoming a visa card user;
  • launching an Eftpos (electronic funds transfer at point of sale) platform with dual Sim (subscriber identification module) card and POS (point of sale) terminals for business customers;
  • launching a USSD (unstructured supplementary service data) mobile banking platform branded as Konnect;
  • enhancing retail and corporate internet banking platform; and
  • expanding and enhancing back-office systems to cater for the expanded business. “Considerable investment was made to ensure our banking platforms were robust enough to support a larger bank, with major IT infrastructure upgrades and two new data centres being put in place.
    “During this complex project, we also maintained our focus on the growth of our existing business.