Coronavirus clearly accelerates the trend to digitalisation, worldwide.
How then did it affect a country ahead of the digital pack, such as Kenya, which since 2007 has been zapping cash around the country with phone-to-phone money transfer, M-Pesa? “I think we survived because if migrating our transactions to the digital channels where we already had success”, says Oigara. “More than 98% of our transactions are already out of our premises, and we saw a fourfold increase in digital transactions since last March”.
It has allowed the bank to execute debt relief remotely. “Nearly 35% of our loans have been rescheduled, on average for 6 months, and that is in addition to the almost $1bn in the last 11 months to cushion customers through the impact of the pandemic”, says Oigara. He is pessimistic about the survival of some businesses in the tourism and aviation sector, but Covid relief is no
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