Uzoma Dozie is the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer
of Diamond Bank Plc. In this interview, he talks about his foray into banking,
advocacy for the use of digital technology to enhance its operations and his
other interests
Diamond Bank Plc is one of Nigeria’s foremost banks. As its
Managing Director/CEO, how are you delivering on its mission and vision?
If you look at our mission statement, it’s about the people,
customer experience and delivering superior shareholder value. From the best
people perspective, it’s all about getting the right staff and creating an
enabling environment for staff to work, so that when people leave the
organisation, you can pause and say, “How have they left and what value have
they added?” People are very important
to us because when it comes to delivering on customer service, anybody can do
that but the great moment for us is that they come back to us satisfied because
we have added value to their lives. Therefore, you need the right kind of
people to be able to meet these demands. If you do that, all will be well. At
Diamond Bank, we don’t chase profits because we strongly believe that if we deliver
on our promises, that will follow suit and we’ve seen that happen.
Tell us a bit about your core responsibilities.
My core responsibilities are actually very simple; it’s
about people management and also being the brand ambassador of the bank. My job
is making sure that I create an enabling environment, promote the brand and I
am at the forefront of ensuring that the culture of the organisation is kept
intact. My job here is not about sitting behind a desk, it is all about taking
the front burner to lead by showing example in the workplace and on the field.
There must be good leadership even at teller points in the banking hall because
those who are there must realise that their jobs are important. You must be
able to make your team know that their jobs are important. A typical example is
this: if you are a man and your driver knows that you cannot drive, you are
like a hostage within your own space. If he knows that you can drive better
than he does, he won’t take you for granted and that is exactly the kind of
things that we are trying to promote here.
What is the place of Diamond Bank in today’s banking sphere?
We want to be the best retail bank in Nigeria. Every bank
wants to be a good brand but the question is how many people can you service every
day and what value are you adding to their lives? We are different because our
style of banking is different. We also know that banking of yesterday is not
the same as what’s obtainable today and banking of tomorrow will not be what is
obtainable today.
What has changed in terms of banking structures since you
came on board?
I think what has changed is our strategy. We have moved to a
digital platform which is the only way to revamp banking services and that also
means leadership by example. Let me give you an instance; we have decided that
by the end of 2017, all our transactions will become paperless for many
reasons. It enforces our digital drive and from a sustainability perspective,
it will reduce the cost of paper. Beyond that, going digital reduces cost,
enhances security and also facilitates creativity and innovation. For you to be
successful at that, you must be able to guide your staff. For the mere fact that I don’t sign any
internal documents means that everything has to come up electronically and it
is not the question of a document getting to one source that scans it and sends
it back to me. Everything is done electronically.
What specific things are you doing to train and retrain your
staff to meet up with these demands?
We are very fortunate with our staff because we have a young
management team and staff, so we have people who are digitally literate. We are
the ones who have had to train ourselves and keep up with the society. Anybody
can use a mobile phone; people use mobile phones to text and chat but there are
many other things that you can use a smart phone to do. Our job is to enhance
and increase that capacity from 20 per cent to about 50 or 60 per cent and
that’s where the innovation of going digital is.
Apart from digital technology, what other innovations have
you brought into banking?
There are three that
I will tell you about; Diamond Yellow, Cash Deposition and Esusu. Let me start
with Diamond Yellow; it took Diamond Bank two years to get six million customers
and we added six million more in a space of two years. When the new customers
actually opened their accounts, there was no paper, it was just
self-registration and it was across the country. Not one of them actually
entered a banking hall, so that is a feat.
In doing that, how
were you able to cater to the needs of those who are not lettered?
That is where the beauty of the Nigerian population lies and
we sometimes underestimate the Nigerian population. We often think that people
are not lettered but they use their mobile phones, send text messages and
recharge their phones as well. That is where the art of retail banking comes in
handy; communication must be simple enough so that people can actually
understand and that is what we’ve focused on. We also know that the kind of
banking that we do for our corporate clients is completely different from the
one that we do at the bottom of the pyramid and it has to be simple. It’s not
about reinventing the wheel but showing them a better way and communicating
with customers in the language that they actually understand. In terms of the
Esusu innovation, we took the local thrift system (ajo) and amplified it, so we
are not doing anything new. We needed to do something that someone like the
local market woman will completely understand. We just told her that using the
ajo system is more secure, you can collect your money 24/7 and you can also
save. The proof of the pudding is that
in two years, we’ve had over half a million people and over N5bn in balances
and about 92 per cent are happy with their transactions and most of these
people are found in the market. If you go to Iddo market for instance, you have
a bank there but people don’t walk into the banking hall because it is not
convenient for their working hours and some of them don’t even understand how
the banking system works. The innovation that we have taken there is not come
and bank with us, rather, we will take banking to you. There is an analogy that
my mother tells me. She says that when somebody comes to your house and you are
eating, there are two questions that you can ask him. They appear the same but
they are different: Do you want to eat? or Come and eat. They are two different
things, so for us, the question is not do you want to bank, rather, it is come
and bank and that is our philosophy.
In this period of recession, what is Diamond Bank doing to
help SMEs grow their business?
There are things that
we are doing today and we hope to do much more tomorrow. That is one of the
reasons we are at the forefront of
promoting a digital and cashless Nigeria. We are in business, so we know the
cost of going digital and this cost is not just from a financial perspective,
it’s from an operational perspective or should I say business enablement. Now, despite the
recession, Nigeria is a place where there is a market and several opportunities
in the retail space because you can see that we have a lot of consumers who do
not have products. We have a lot of people in some parts of the country who do
not have access to goods and services. Our role therefore is how do we help you
to provide much more than banking services? By banking with Diamond Bank, you
belong to a community that gives you access to over 10 million customers.
You’ll also have access to financial advisory services. Nigeria is actually the
most entrepreneurial country in the world so you have people who are
entrepreneurs scattered all over the country. You only have to go to Aba to see
what is happening there, so we provide financial advisory services and access
to markets. We also create a lot of
awareness about products. We are now bringing a lot of people into our market
so, if I produce goods, how do I take these goods from point A to B, how do my
customers access these goods? Business is not just about providing the goods;
it’s about creating enough channels through which they will get to the
customer, regardless of where he is in Nigeria. Those are the kind of things
that we are doing and it is part of our beyond banking philosophy. It’s not
just about the transaction that a customer will carry out, it’s all about the
share of wallet and because the cash is no longer in the wallet, it might be
elsewhere. Hence, if you are part of the customer’s life, the share of wallet
will take care of itself.
How have you been able to maximise profit regardless of a
failing economy?
Banking is very simple and it’s all about making your
customers happy through the services on offer. What we are trying to do is that
we’ve realised the need to diversify the economy so we must provide services to
a wide range of people and not just a small group of people. The reason why
Nigeria has the problem that it has now is that we are not maximising the
opportunities in the country.We are only focusing on oil and not looking at
Agriculture and other sectors. We are not even looking at how to make money out
of our Nollywood industry and other things attached to it. The Made-in-Nigeria
theme should resonate more. About five years ago, we said to ourselves that our
business model was not sustainable and we went back to the drawing board and
started a retail journey and that has allowed us to grow, especially in the
area of the Treasury Single Account( TSA). Now, we have a retail base and our
next journey is how to play a role in providing credit facilities regardless of
the inefficiencies in the macro-economy.
What solutions would you proffer to some of the economic
challenges facing the country?
First of all, I think we’ve already invested in
infrastructure in Nigeria, especially when it comes to payment platforms and
telecoms. With the right policies in place, I believe that government is really
going to enforce the cashless policy. That will help to create a lot of
commerce in Nigeria. It will also reduce the cost of doing business and reduce corruption. As you know, corruption
actually disables businesses. It will also save cost and I’ll give you a
typical example; you know in Nigeria, you can actually do away with Point of
Sale terminals as people don’t need it because they already do mobile to mobile
payments. You can also do away with the POS because it still involves using a
card to transact business. The fact that I can send money to someone and he can
get it immediately is amazing. Even in the United Kingdom, for me to be able to
do that you will pay an extra fee and it is not applicable to everybody so, we
have deployed a lot of solutions in Nigeria. Using POS is a good choice but
people are already using their mobile phones as a form of payment technology
and they can just wake up one morning and decide to make a particular mobile
money transfer which has been very
successful in the last 24 months.
Talking about digital technology, in what other ways has it
transformed banking services in Nigeria?
If you look at the number of transactions that people do
today as opposed to 20 years ago, it has quadrupled and the cost of that is not
in proportion to the number of transactions. 26 years ago, when I started
banking, for a bank to break even, it will take about two years. Now, 80 per
cent of transactions are not done in the bank, you have ATMs, Point of Sale
terminals and all and it means that people are no longer coming to the bank ,
you are doing 10 times more the transactions that you do electronically.
Electronic payment is just basically information. I transfer money to someone;
he doesn’t see the cash but receives information that money has been
transferred into his account. It could be in the form of a text message or an
email, so I am moving information around. Therefore, the speed of information
has increased. In the past, what you had was that you walk into any branch of a
bank; you pay in the money, collect the teller and then, send it to the person.
Then, the receiver will have to go to his or her own bank to check and that
whole process takes a minimum of two days. Once you increase the velocity of
money, it increases commerce because you would be able to take decisions
quicker and enhance operations in banks, including ours. The beauty of this is
that you are also able to carry out audit because you know who, when and how
money is moved around. The fact that you can take decisions much quicker will
enable commerce and it has a direct relationship with the GDP growth. You only
have to look at what is happening in Kenya in terms of receiving money.They are
doing things much deeper and differently. As a country, we have much more
potential but we haven’t been able to unlock them and we can do so much more
because we are twice the size of Kenya.
What was your career path after you left the university?
After I left the university, I was at a crossroads because I
didn’t know what to do.
Why was that?
I guess I was looking for a job in a place that would allow
me to be independent of my parents so I knew it would be either banking or oil
and gas. I decided on banking and started with Guaranty Trust Bank, now GTBank.
What stirred your interest in banking?
My father was a banker so it just came naturally to me. I
had already spent a year working in a lab and I did a master’s degree but I
wanted to try something new and decided on a one year experiment in banking
which has turned out to be 26 years now and I’m still here. Also, sometimes,
when you start in the right place, it encourages you to see what you can do.
From there, you’ll just continue and see what you make of your career. We’ve
been fortunate enough to see the growth of the banking industry from private
companies to limited liability companies. We have also seen banks move from
Nigeria to other parts of the continent and we’ve also seen how customers and
lifestyles have changed and how we have also followed the trend. For me, the
most important thing is how we have been an industry that was behind that of
Europe to one that is now at par with it, in terms of the type of services that
we provide for customers. We have our mobile banking app and I have not seen an
app in any American or European bank that actually matches it. It’s a lifestyle
app and we continue to improve on it. What I’m trying to do is to create a
mobile app such that when they throw me out of banking, I won’t have to walk
into any bank again. I have an app that allows me to interact with the world
without a human interface.
What personal traits have enabled you to be successful at
what you do?
I’ll have to thank my father, Pascal Dozie, for that because
he is a very simple man. He has taught me the virtues of simplicity and contentment.
You must be content, whatever the situation is. On my part, I try to keep
things simple and that also works for what we are trying to do in Diamond Bank
as well. As an individual, be content and you will get the best in life without
even knowing that it is there. It is not the pursuit of great things that
matter, it’s how you actualise it. For me and my team, why we actually enjoy
our jobs is that we are constantly trying to create new experiences and
different things. Anybody can do the mundane things of life but you need to be
able to do extraordinary things so that you can retire well. For me, I want to
retire with excitement to face every day.
What are some of the lasting legacies that you’ll want to
leave when you exit as MD/CEO of Diamond Bank Plc?
I would like to see a
situation where people don’t just see Diamond Bank as just a bank but rather
see it as a place for everyone. One of
our commercials describes the bank as a place for everyone; from the customers
who are looking for services and products to people who want to actually create
services and products for the future of Nigeria. Many organisations that are
quite big in the world today thrive because they are people-focused. We are not
just a bank because we actually provide much more than banking services to
people, we are actually part of the community.
How would you describe your personality?
Before I became the MD/CEO, I was just the regular Uzoma
Dozie who was an executive director and everybody knew me. Even till date, I
don’t put on airs and graces. I walk up and down this office with ease but as
soon as I became the MD/CEO and I walked into the boardroom, everybody stood up
and addressed me by the title. I told all of them to sit down because I didn’t
see it as a big deal and I kept driving that point home. If I walk in now,
nobody will bow their heads and that is because here, power rests in the
character of the individual and not the power of the office. I came into office
as Uzoma Dozie and I will leave in the same manner. I think I’m a very simple person and I have
an open-door policy, whereby people can walk in and talk to me. When you have
to manage people, you must always be reachable.
My phones are always on because you have to always deal with situations
and people. I answer calls and always give a yes or no answer, with a promise
to get back to them.
How do you unwind and relax?
As MD/CEO, I’ll
probably unwind when I retire but I’ll tell you about my hobbies and I try to
integrate my hobbies into my day-to-day activities. I like photography, so I
take a lot of pictures.
What are the inspirations behind some of the shots that you
take?
Landscape, people and action. Nigeria is a huge concept so
there is always inspiration from everywhere. I am looking forward to having an
exhibition someday. I love to capture moments and it is all about how you capture what you are doing and how you capture the right moments through
pictures.
How do you handle competition as a bank?
Our competition is
not other banks, our competition is those things that they are doing. We find
out who is the best in delivering service and cross-match them. What can you
take from other people? That is one of the things photography does: you can
capture a moment and take a good shot. I also play golf and tennis. I am a
sports person.
Do you read books?
I read books when I can and the last book that I read was
The Meaning of Life by Viktor Frankl. It is a story of a man who survived the
Auschwitz Nazi concentration camps and he was talking about finding the meaning
of life and wondered why people commit suicide. The book drove home the point
that everybody’s life, regardless of whom and where you are, has a meaning.
Relating it to the Nigerian situation, we are in the struggle of making Nigeria
great. Since I became MD/CEO, we have had all types of issues and I’ve realised
that maybe that is where my meaning lies: my meaning is to take the
organisation through this great struggle and what doesn’t kill you makes you
stronger. The goal is to come out as one of the strongest banks in Nigeria.
Apart from your
father, who are some of the people that you look up to?
They are all dead and I will give you their names. There are
two people; Alexander the Great who I like
for the simple reason that he was a visionary leader. He led from the
front a small army of people and redefined their thinking. There is also Steve
Jobs because regardless of what happened, he created solutions and beautiful
designs for people. His gift to the world was in his simplicity which we have
talked about before and his ability to create beautiful designs.
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