This year’s International Women’s Day theme is Celebrating Women who are making contributions in their different capacities to improve the lives of other women. There has often been debate on whether the world needs a day set aside for the woman, and why they cannot be recognized as a matter of daily routine. I think it is important to have a Women’s Day because it allows the world to take stock of what we have done for womankind. A day to look back at previous goals and evaluate them. This day creates a level of national and international accountability by which to judge ourselves and build the future on.
We all celebrated the women in our lives differently. SBM Bank for instance aptly celebrated frontline workers by visiting them in their workplaces and offering PPEs and cute personal care gifts. Because let’s face it. A woman can easily get so lost in everything else that she completely forgets herself. We have all been at a point where we do not even have a minute to put our feet up, snuggle with some hot chocolate and a blankie, and just be.
On Monday 8th March, my colleagues and I accompanied the SBM team on a little tour around Upper Hill Nairobi as they went to deliver the gifts and PPEs to women led clinics whose owners bank with them. SBM offers these SMEs friendly services that remove the chore out of banking and weaves it seamlessly into lifestyle.
In this article, we shall highlight three doctors as a representation of SBM’s efforts towards being closer to their SME customers.
I call SBM’s gesture apt because as much as Covid-19 has not left any sector untouched, it would be fair to say that the healthcare sector has been the worst hit. Because this pandemic is first a health issue and then a social economic issue. Healthcare workers are after all in the eye of the storm and are walking into high personal risk every day.
First visit of the day was to Dr. Edna Kamau – a Gastroenterologist at Upper Hill Gastroenterology. Edna is an award-winning doctor, having won the prestigious World Endoscopy Organization Emerging Stars award in 2017. With SBM as her bank, she is able to operate her finances through Mobile-to-bank. A platform that gets integrated into the bank account and that allows all M-Pesa transactions to be routed directly into the account. This is a facility that clinics, supermarkets, and such other entities really value for the time it enables them to save, and for being cashless.
The second visit was to Dr. Lucy Manyara who owns the Family Eye Clinic, also in Upper Hill. Dr. Lucy says that as much as Covid-19 has hit businesses including hers hard, things are looking up and with SBM she has a solid partner. She is also able to enjoy remote banking with SBM and should there be need to visit a branch, there is one right in her building.
The last visit of the day was to the Nairobi IF Clinic at Landmark Plaza where we met Dr. Joy Noreh – a fertility specialist and co-founder of the Center. Quite an interesting visit because reproductive health is something that touches on every woman. Fertility treatments are getting destigmatized in the country and more women are seeking options to motherhood. For this, Dr. Joy is quite busy.
She therefore appreciates banking with SBM where she enjoys near personalized banking services. Coupled with remote banking and the facilities mentioned above with the other doctors, then she’s able to get cumbersome banking out of the way and concentrate on her core business.
Those are three women who are leading in their fields and we celebrate them this International Women’s Day.
Modern banking
A lot of businesses have gone down because they failed to tune to the frequencies of the new age customer. One sector that could have gone south if the players slackened is the banking sector which was hitherto distant, clinical and in earlier years, archaic.
The era of digital money is upon us. As much as not everyone is in a position to completely cut out visits to the branch, remote banking is certainly enticing, and more people will hop onto it in good time. People want to bank alright. But they also want to un-bank themselves and its kudos for banks that have recognized this and created products to help customers do that.
