Polaris Bank shone brightest over the weekend as its bespoke home-grown digital bank, VULTe won for the third time, Nigeria’s ‘Best Digital Bank of the Year’ prize at the prestigious BusinessDAY’s Banks And Other Financial Institutions (BAFI) Awards.
Polaris Bank also scooped ‘Best MSME Bank of the Year’ award at the same event.
VULTe, is a digital banking platform designed to enable customers to consummate every banking transaction – from account opening, through requesting for certain categories of loans – to generating bank statements. It also connects the customer to discover lifestyle trends and social events. It is an all-in-one solution that is created to offer the most convenience for customers and built to provide solutions to everyday challenges of accessing financial services and more.
In the last 12 months, VULTe which hitherto caters more to individual customers, now has enhanced capabilities to render seamless self-services to SMEs, High Net worth, and retail customers. The over 40 million MSME operators in Nigeria could now use Vulte to access collateral-free loans for personal and business purposes; where eligible entrepreneurs and SME operators could apply and get up to N20 million in a space of 5 minutes without visiting the Bank in person.
While presenting the Best Digital Bank award to Polaris Bank, BAFI Awards organisers disclosed that the awards selection/review committee voted Polaris Bank’s VULTe the winner having outperformed its industry peers, across eight metrics for consideration.
The metrics include; strength of strategy for attracting and gaining digital customers, accelerated user engagement, success in getting clients to use digital offerings, growth of digital customers, and platform security.
Other metrics are the breadth of product offerings for retail and corporate clients, evidence of tangible benefits gained from digital initiatives and web/mobile site design, intuitiveness and functionality.
At the same BAFI Awards, Polaris Bank was declared ‘MSME Bank of the Year’ making it a back-to-back win for the bank.
In the last nine months, Polaris Bank had committed billions in loans to expand operations of MSME operating in Nigeria.
Polaris Bank had in May 2022 launched a N1 billion fund for MSMEs in partnership with Lagos State Employment Trust Fund (LSETF) in what the Bank explained was aimed at providing the much-needed funding to create wealth and empower entrepreneurs and players within the MSME space in Nigeria, starting with Lagos.
Prior to the launch of the N1 billion MSME Fund, Polaris Bank had committed, and indeed, continued to provide multi billion financing to MSME operators across sectors, health inclusive among other incentives, like moratorium on facilities granted to cushion businesses following the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on businesses.
Receiving the award on behalf of the Bank, Dele Adeyinka, Retail & Digital Banking Divisional Head, while expressing the Bank’s appreciation to BusinessDay for the recognition, dedicated the
awards to the Bank’s customers and stakeholders for making VULTe what it is today and promised that “Polaris Bank will continue to impact MSME digitally through innovative banking products, affordable finance and creative services that add significant value for the greater good of all stakeholders’.
