The Chief Executive Officer of Sterling Bank, Abubakar Suleiman, has urged more lenders in the country to join in the cancellation of bank transfer fees to improve the banking experience for Nigerians.
Suleiman made this call on Wednesday at a press conference in Lagos following its recent decision to cancel bank transfer fees for itself for any local online transactions by its customers.
The announcement, made on April 1, initially sparked widespread arguments, with many assuming it was a marketing prank tied to April Fools’ Day. However, Sterling Bank confirmed that it was no stunt. With this move, Sterling becomes the first major Nigerian bank.
Suleiman said, “This is not a gimmick. This is the future. And it starts now. For years, Nigerians have paid fees just to move their own money. We’re saying no more.”
Suleiman explained that the decision stemmed from years of digital transformation. The bank built a custom callback system capable of handling over five million customers, already processing more than 180 million transactions. It also migrated entirely from a legacy European core to a homegrown platform built for scale and deployed a private cloud environment with capacity well beyond current and future demand.
“We’ve engineered a platform that can support 50 times our current customer base without breaking a sweat. It’s time to pass the benefits of that transformation back to the people,” Suleiman added.
Calling on other lenders to join the initiative to improve the experience of the banking populace, he said, “This is fundamental; we are hoping that, because we’ve done this, because we’ve taken the courage to do this, other institutions might also want to follow.
It doesn’t matter if they choose to, because we are committed to it, but if they do follow, it is a lot easier for us, and hopefully, we can do something that, finally, Nigerians can be happy with us as banks, and everybody can be proud of us. I believe Nigerian banks can remove these fees and still deliver excellent profits. I will know this because we are going to prove it. But if we all do it together, it will happen faster.”
The bank’s Growth Executive, Retail, Consumer and Business Banking Directorate, Obinna Ukachukwu, reiterated the need for other banks to join in the removal of transfer fees for the sake of the banking populace.
“Taking out the fees is not the end of it. I know we’ve always been known as the one-customer bank; our technology stack historically limited us from achieving that particular one-customer goal the way we always wanted to achieve it, but now that we’re a lot more flexible, we will increasingly see benefits layered on the accounts of our customers.
“Also, we will be very happy if other banks adopt this strategy to give back transaction fees to customers. Today, while we’ve taken out fees, we still pay other institutions their portion of it. I think our role in Nigeria and the financial system generally is a transformative one. Yes, we care a lot about our organisation at Sterling, but we care more about the people of Nigeria. We care more about the country. We care more about the system entirely, the industry. So, we want the industry to increasingly move along this path that we’ve moved.”
Under the new policy, Sterling customers will enjoy free transfers for all local transactions conducted via the bank’s mobile app. This translates into significant savings, particularly for individuals and new small business owners who make frequent daily transfers.
