Paul Ondiwa, Head of card business at Ecobank PHOTO: Courtesy
NAIROBI, KENYA: I arrived in Accra at around six in the evening for an interview that ought to have taken place at around mid-day which is 3pm Kenyan time, since Ghana is three hours behind Nairobi.
I was travelling by road from Lome, Togo after a previous day AGM for Ecobank, a pan African bank operating in 32 countries in the continent at their Headquarters.
On arrival at Ghana’s Best Westerner Hotel where the interview was set I found a note instructing me to call a number of a gentleman who has been waiting for me since mid-morning, probably he was tired of waiting and thought I was not going to make it for the appointment hence the walk out from the hotel’s lobby.
When I contacted the number he told me to give him a minute as he was not far away from the hotel.
What stood out for me was his patience owing to the fact that he is a busy man because I would imagine the amount of task bestowed on him as the Group Head of card business in charge of 32 African countries where Ecobank Group operates which translates to ensuring that ATM machines and cards are up throughout to enable the lender’s 11.1 million customers access their money without delays or any disappointment.
“So Ghana is the control center of Ecobank’s cards, this is where we power our cards and also ensures smooth operations of the bank’s 2,773 ATms across the continent, I am in charge of the business,” he says in an interview.
Meet Paul Ondiwa, Kenya’s card 'ambassador', a career that has seen him travel widely to share knowledge with his peers across the World.
Ecobank is not his first station, he has worked with Barclays bank in its card business both in Kenya and the United Kingdom and the pioneer technical person in building Metropol Credit Reference Bureau (CRB) system, a database which Kenyan banks now relies on to determine credit worthiness of borrowers before advancing loans.
The CRB services leverage full-file credit information sharing and alternative data sources from microfinance institutions, SACCOs, higher education loans board, utility firms, mobile phone companies and providers of goods and services on credit to help customers improve their access to finance and increase the credit providers’ capacity to lend profitably to more customers.
On request by any lender, the Metropol system gives credit history of anyone to help banks ascertain whether one is good or a bad debtor to avoid businesses running into problems of non-performing loans.
He recalls that before the system everything was chaotic as some people had developed a career in acquiring loans through dubious means such as printing fake salary slips to meet loan requirement and on defaulting some perfected in using their ID cards and passports alternately to get loans from different lenders without easily getting detected.
So in coming up with the system Ondiwa says they had to get more details from Kenya’s immigration department to seal the double use of passport and identification cards in obtaining loans.
“I am happy wherever I am seated because we somehow solved an issue that was headache to the banking industry, people’s credit ratings are now better and banks are making sense in their loan business,” he says.
In his current job as the Group Head of Card business for Ecobank, he oversees 32 countries where the lender operates. He says that since his appointment he has been able to champion changes that have improved the adoption of cards in the continent.
“My first job was to make the Group’s 32 affiliates competitive, I had to inject radical measures such as the idea of instant cards which has done away older model of shipping cards from Ghana where we are based to our branches across Africa,” he says that the older version was not time and cost sensitive.
“We have also done away with the paper pin and introduced online generated pin which has also been a milestone in our card business,” he says in an interview.
Operating in the field of technology, Ondiwa is kept on his toes knowing too well that what is knew today could be a junk the following day.
He predicts that card business will be no more in few years to come and this is supported by the high rate of mobile phone adoption in Africa.
“Imagine carrying more than two cards in your wallet, it will no longer be tenable and we have started thinking along those lines,” he says. “People now prefer to transact from their mobile phones and in countries such as Kenya the adoption of technology is huge where we are seeing infrastructure such as ATMs reducing,” he says.
He says Ecobank Group for instance has already commissioned a project on the possibility of integrating all the cards it offers into an app such that customers will only need their phones to access the plastic money.
During his time at the Barclays Bank he left a legacy which is building and expanding massively the bank’s acquiring infrastructure (ATMs and the Point of Sale) this was before he moved to Barclay card division in the United Kingdom.
The father of two sons (Sinani and Hawi) says keeping abreast with latest developments in the industry and talking to customers on the impact of his innovation has made him prevail.
