Fidelity Bank, in partnership with the German Development Cooperation (GIZ), is to emback on a financial literacy campaign that is targeted at impacting more than 400,000 people in the Greater Accra, Western, Ashanti, Eastern and Central regions over the next two years.
The project will arm the public, especially unbanked and under-banked persons, with information and advice on the benefits and appropriate use of financial services and products, particularly savings, investments, loans and micro insurance.
Fidelity Bank’s Financial Inclusion Department and GIZ, under its Development Partnership with the Private Sector (DPP) programme, are jointly financing the project.
Consequently, the partners have held a partnership workshop in Accra to prepare for the rollout.
Fidelity Bank’s Director of Financial Inclusion, Dr William Derban, said the concept was to leverage the bank’s Innovative Agency Banking service and Smart Account product to deliver tailor-made financial literacy material to the informal sector.
He explained that in less than a year, the bank had opened about 100,000 Smart Accounts and set up 200 Smart Agents nationwide under Agency Banking, where the general public could undertake their banking business in addition to the traditional bank branches.
“The crux of the project will be the training of Smart Agents and Smart Friends (Fidelity Sales Ambassadors who open Smart Accounts) as financial literacy ambassadors,” he explained.
Dr Derban added that the all-inclusive project was not limited to Fidelity Bank customers but also targeted at non-customers with the ultimate aim of improving financial literacy in the country.
The Project Manager of the Programme for Sustainable Economic Development (PSED) at GIZ, Mr Hartwig Michaelsen, commended Fidelity Bank for pioneering the Agency Banking model in the country and going a step further to forge strategic partnerships to facilitate the bridging of the gap to bring the unbanked into the formal financial system.