Access Bank woos customers with new quick loan scheme

One of Nigeria’s biggest bank, Access Bank Plc, says it has introduced Quick Loan Scheme or Payday Loan with a daily loan target of N400 million to at least 20,000 customers.

On the bank’s website, they highlight that you do not need to have a salary account in Access Bank for you to access the Payday loan. The bank claims you will, however, need to open an account in the bank for the loan to be disbursed.

The MD/CEO of Access Bank Plc, Herbert Wigwe who revealed this recently said the bank disburses about N200 million daily to 4,600 customers and its eager to double that number to N400 million and 20,000 customers by end of the year.

‘We have also grown our digital loan business as far as our financial inclusion and normal traditional retail strategy by expanding on our digital lending capabilities to include more products such as salary advancements, small tickets, personal loans and device financing in addition to what we call our payday loans.

Access Bank charges an upfront fee of 1 per cent flat, 4 per cent flat interest and insurance of 0.15 per cent of the loan amount is taken upon loan disbursement (5.15 per cent total all payable upfront). The loans are for 31 days. Average all-in lending cost in the market is between 4-6 per cent monthly.

Wigwe also claims it has been aggressive with the marketing of its payday loans and has now booked about N18 billion in the first half of 2019 alone from N11 billion a year earlier, noting the bank has issued out about 1 million unique loans as at June this year.

He explained that the default rates for its payday loans are below 3 per cent claiming that in most cases it is 0 per cent. Explaining further, he asserted that the reason for the low default rates was because their borrowers were salary earners who already have accounts opened with the banks and their salaries domiciled in those accounts.

So for the digital loan book, which is largely dominated by payday loans at the minute, the NPL ratios there have typically been well below 3 per cent. Now, the reason for this as Herbert alluded to earlier on is they are based on customers who already have their salaries with us.

Access Bank claims it has 31 million customers and acquires at a rate of 500,000 new customers daily relying mainly on digital means and its agent banking initiative, and signed up about 1.6 million new customers since it merged with Diamond Bank.