Financial institutions and other companies seeking to offer digital services to the public must meet people face-fo-face to build trust, especially among the more mature part of the population.
That is the advice from George Thomas, chief executive officer (CEO) of Barbados’ first and only fully digital bank, Sagicor Bank (Barbados) Limited.
Thomas revealed that when the bank started in early 2023, he was disappointed that only 1 800 people became clients in the first month.
Now, he said, Sagicor Bank was about to “cross the 30 000-person mark in less than 30 months”.
The CEO was speaking while participating in the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank’s (ECCB) Seventh Annual Conference With Licensed Financial Institutions on November 6.
He was part of a panel which gathered in the Bernice White Lecture Room at the ECCB’s headquarters in Basseterre, St Kitts and Nevis to discuss From Data To Dignity: Empowering Consumers Through Digital Finance.
Get human and physical was his advice for entities striving to get customers to use digital services. By this, he meant that rather than relying exclusively on digital platforms to reach people, especially older customers, meeting them in-person was very important.
“When we first opened, the first month we got 1 800 people. I was disappointed . . . because from the surveys, everybody wanted to go digital, but everybody wants to talk it, but when it comes time to do [it] they start to get scared,” Thomas recalled.
“Of those 1 800, 70 per cent were Millennials or Gen Zers who sleep with their phones, so that’s all they want to do. We had to go meet with the Barbados Association of Retired [Persons], we had to go meet with the . . . communities. We had to get human and physical to cut through.
“I think one other month, we did about 2 000 people, but [it was a] steady 1 000 and I was like, ‘why can’t I get past that’, but at least I could maintain the 1 000. So today, probably in a week or two we’ll cross the 30 000 person mark in less than 30 months,” he told the conference audience.
Thomas said his proudest statistic “is the 11 per cent baby boomers that we now have because we went into the community and met people”.
He added: “So the key is to build trust, because we are all hard-wired for human connection from birth with our mothers and our parents, we still
require human connection.”
There has to be a constant dialogue. Barbados’ digital penetration is good so that is one fortunate thing for me. We use a lot of . . . digital media, but we had to get very physical because in the beginning the digital wasn’t working.
“It worked for the young people who are transactional and who will put $5 on the bank [or] $10, because we allow you to just have something on without any charges, but it did not work for the people that were really doing banking.
Thomas was speaking after the panel moderator C. Teresa Smith, ECCB director and corporate secretary, reported on the recent findings of the inaugural Eastern Caribbean Currency Union’s (ECCU) Financial Literacy And Inclusion Survey.
“From that, we got a sense as to what the region faces in terms of its literacy, its inclusion scores. And we noticed that the average ECCU financial literacy scores stand at roughly 12.2 out of 20, which is 61 per cent. Product awareness is high, but recent product usage is only 54.5 per cent, digital payments remain low,” she reported.
“Fewer than half of ECCU adults made an electronic payment in the past year, that was based on the survey results. This indicates that access existed, trust lags and behaviour, not awareness, is now the constraint.”
She suggested that financial inclusion “must evolve from access to agency, empowering consumers with control, capability and confidence in how data drives financial decisions”.
Referencing the statistics from the ECCU research, Thomas advised that “cutting through the trust barrier will require a programme around client education [and] information sharing”.
“In Barbados, it’s being driven by the Central Bank, by the Bankers’ Association, I am the deputy chair of the Bankers’ Association of Barbados, and we have public outreach programmes in each individual bank,” he noted.
“We’ve had to go out and meet clients and potential clients directly and going into businesses to help people understand this is how to manage your finances digitally.” (SC)
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