Banking growing with digital platforms

THE banking sector in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has developed significantly over the years, says outgoing BSP Financial Group (BSP) chief executive officer Robin Fleming.
“It has developed not just in terms of the size of the sector and its contributions to the PNG economy, but also in terms of how banking is offered to customers.
“The availability of digital products and offerings such as mobile banking with telco top-ups, power top-ups, transfers to other peoples’ accounts using a phone,” Fleming told The National.
Commenting on BSP’s own progress, Fleming said “In PNG, BSP processes over 11 million transactions a month across its mobile phone platform.
“We also process about three million transactions a month over our ATM’s (automated teller machines) and over 3.5 million transactions a month via merchants using BSP Eftpos terminals.
“To put this into context, just five years ago BSP processed only 2.5 million mobile banking transactions a month and 1.7 million transactions a month using a BSP Eftpos terminal.
“These are exponential increases in transactional activity undertaken outside of a branch.
“Despite the rapid improvement in access to banking services using digital channels, the number of people who still choose to go to a bank to make deposit or withdrawals has not reduced and remains at around a million branch transactions a month.
“As customers become more familiar with our digital offerings and see the benefits of doing transactions using mobile merchant and mobile school fee payments on *131#, then even fewer people will need to visit a branch.
“BSP remains the only bank willing to provide banking services to all sectors and as many regions as possible in PNG, encouraging customers to use digital offerings.”