Marketing could have helped avoid the banking challenges
Mr Kofi Safo Akyea, a Corporate Executive in Residence (CEiR) has said the banking challenges have laid bare serious issues in the field of financial services marketing, especially with regards to customer and retail banking.
He said challenges provided an opportunity to re-imagine retail banking in the country, harnessing the so called fourth industrial revolution variables.
Mr Akyea was speaking at a symposium on the theme: “Marketing Perspectives on the Banking Challenges in Ghana.”
The Symposium is part of the schedule of the Corporate Executive in Residence (CEiR) of the Department of Marketing and Entrepreneurship of the University of Ghana Business School and enabled the CEiR share their views and experiences on a designated topic.
This process is supposed to loop in experience and insight from practice into academia and add to the School’s continued tough leadership in the field of management and said there was a lot the marketing practitioners could bring on board to the banking sector in terms of strategy formations.
“It is an opportunity to re-think in the marketing echo system to help in the consumer banking,” he said.
He said most consumer-focused businesses were marketing led, but the consumer banking in Ghana was not, adding that, “in my experience, banks are behind the curve in consumer value delivery excellence.”
Mr Akyea said marketing had a place in the current reforms being carried out by the Bank of Ghana and that would help consumer banking to value customers in the process of developing their products and services.
He said better marketing could have helped the banks to avoid some of the challenges.
Dr Lord Mensah, a Lecturer said Banks were not doing marketing as it should be done, but marketing as much as Banks were concern was about visibility.
He said Banks were not creating the needed value as much as their marketing values were concern, adding that “relating marketing to finance at the operational level, we got it wrong as a country.”
The Lecturer said the BoG itself needed restructuring in its operations, indicating that the Bank had been so close that it kept recruitment structure as a secret from the public.
Professor Ebo Robert Hinson, the Head of Department of Marketing and Entrepreneurship of the University of Ghana Business School said innovation would be key coupled with mental agility and technology was important to the banking sector going forward.
He said banks needed to go back to the basis of marketing to improve on their banking operations and serve its customers effectively and were much concerned with the flashy side of marketing, where big billboards were put up than its importance to value delivery.
The Symposium will serve as a primer for a one-day Research Roundtable in the second quarter of 2019 on the topic “The Future of Banking in Ghana-Marketing Perspectives.”
Source: GNA