RapidCollect Qorus Banking Innovation Awards 2023

Ecobank operates in 33 African countries and has an international office with a banking licence in Paris, France, making us the largest pan-African banking group. We have an increasing number of SME and corporate customers who require collection services across our footprint. A number of these merchants are not incorporated in all the countries where they have operations and would like us to collect on their behalf (e.g. Airlines, Schools, Governments, etc.). These customers would prefer to manage the collections through a centralised account structure that does not require them to open accounts in each country but would enable them to access collection service through our network instantly. In addition to encouraging SMEs and corporates, the African Continental Free Trade Area offers immense trading growth opportunities for Africa’s businesses, so it is imperative that the payment and collection infrastructure proactively caters for the needs of our continent’s small and medium sized businesses by facilitating their cross-border trade. Since its founding, the Bank has had a key mission of helping to provide world-class banking services in Africa while at the same time looking for ways to drive and facilitate intra-Africa transactions. Ecobank designed and introduced RapidCollect to further advance our determination to remove intra-African trade barriers by providing a fast, innovative, secure, hassle-free, compliant and reliable collection solution for our SME and corporate customers which leverages on the collective scale and strength of our 33-country pan-African network and our One Bank ‘manufacture centrally, distribute locally’ model. RapidCollect is an innovative collection product enabling Corporate and SMEs to collect payments from their clients outside their countries instantly and at lower cost than any other current payment solution using local and foreign currencies. The benefits of RapidCollect include: • Payments credited instantly to customers’ accounts; • Enables collection of payments from customers in any of Ecobank’s affiliates in 33 sub-Saharan African countries base on each country regulation; • SME and Corporate customers only need bank accounts in home country (i.e. not in every country with which they operate); • Enables transactions in available local and foreign currencies; • Reduces remittance payment and transaction costs; • Increases payment limits; • Enables collection for corporate clients not necessarily banking with Ecobank; and • Possibility to enable digital channels to facilitate the payment. **** The 'Country' question below only permits one country to be entered, but RapidCollect is available across 33 sub-Saharan African countries: Benin; Burkina Faso; Burundi; Cameroon; Cabo Verde; Central African Republic; Chad; DR Congo; Congo Brazzaville; Cote d'Ivoire; Equatorial Guinea; Gabon; The Gambia; Ghana; Guinea (Conakry); Guinea-Bissau; Kenya; Liberia; Malawi; Mali; Mozambique; Niger; Nigeria; Rwanda; São Tomé and Principe; Senegal; Sierra Leone; South Sudan; Tanzania; Togo; Uganda; Zambia; Zimbabwe.