1. Following the transition from PostBank to Pearl Bank the institution has entered a new chapter of growth and positioning. Could you share the vision behind the rebranding and how the bank has evolved in recent years?

It started in 1926 as a post office, a service department. Fast forward in the late 90s Uganda went through a series of reforms and one of those was privatization because there were so many government entities that were not being optimized, they were very inefficient. So, working with donors, World Bank and so on, government went through a period of disposing of a lot of these entities. And part of that privatization saw the savings arm of the post office create PostBank. That was in 1998, but it started as a credit institution and it was fairly small then, still focusing on bottom of the pyramid. It wasn’t very commercially driven, the capabilities were never developed and it became very difficult to appeal to very large sections of society that needed more robust, dynamic, modern banking solutions.

After 20 years of its existence, it was a bank that was sort of stagnated. It was not growing, didn’t have a strong capital base, was behind on technology, had all these long queues, couldn’t really serve properly and growth was muted. So, in late 2019 there was a change in management. In 2020, around COVID time, a new leadership team came into place and came with a totally different mentality that this entity has to grow. But in order to grow we had to sort out its foundation.

Foundation in terms of deliver service, get rid of the queues, transform the technology, build the skill set of the team, improve the brand perception in the public and sort out governance. That journey resulted in improvement in performance and growth. But we knew at the back of our minds that it was always going to be very difficult to attract high-value partners, high-value customers who associate the brand with the PostBank of yesterday. When you talked about PostBank, they didn’t want to partner with the bank, they didn’t want to bank with us, purely because of what they had in their minds.

It was sort of like a showstopper, yet at that time we had decided to come up with a purpose to drive the institution. A purpose that all the employees, all the stakeholders around the bank can resonate with, and that is one of fostering prosperity for Ugandans being a retail bank. But again, how will you foster prosperity when you cannot reach out to high-value customers, you cannot reach out to high-value partners? Then you’ll never have that national impact. And that started the journey around the rebrand.

And why Pearl Bank? Winston Churchill started that coin in the 50s, “Pearl of Africa”. And it’s catchy, but also pearl represents a lot of things, it represents prosperity, wealth, success; and if you’re saying pearl, if you’re saying your purpose is to foster prosperity for Ugandans, then you better have a name that speaks to your purpose, that represents it. And that’s Pearl Bank. That’s how it was born last year and that’s where we are today; and we believe it’s a brand that is going places.

2. Since the rebranding, how has the bank performed in terms of the deposits lending, customer growth and overall market presence?

We’ve seen a very good reaction in terms of the reasons why we rebranded in the first place. One of them is customer deposits. I think they have really grown. It’s only one year but we’re seeing a lot of customers who ordinarily we would not want to associate with PostBank. However, they’re interested in Pearl Bank. We also have a few partners who have joined us. We recently signed a partnership with a French development agency, AFD, to support lending for entrepreneurs and agriculture space. We have a couple of other players who have given us term sheets and they want to do business with us. And part of that is purely because of the name. Since we became Pearl, we’ve also taken over one of the government schemes, which is agriculture lending to support food security for large-scale farmers. We are running with that and it has been very successful for the last four months.

We’ve also been awarded with the responsibility to manage government fuel digitally because of our digital capabilities, and we’ll put that fuel on the phone, even away from the card, through our wallet. We onboard the fuel stations as merchants and you just give in money. That is very good for transparency and accountability, because the reconciliations are automatic. Someone just pushes fuel to your wallet and you access whatever fuel station, it’s very transparent.

We also have a big project that started as PostBank, which is the Parish Development Model, where we disburse funds. In Uganda it was always a very difficult thing to push money to ultimate beneficiaries because of inefficiencies in the system. Maybe it reached in percentages or got lost along the way. There were so many issues around trying to disburse money to people. So, we created the Wendi wallet, a different technology like the ones the telcos use for mobile money. With the Wendi mobile wallet, we can reach any Ugandan with a national ID, wherever they are. Whether they are at the borders of Sudan or at the border of Tanzania, we can reach all Ugandans as long as they have a national ID. It’s very easy in terms of accountability, because now government has that assurance that if we release this X amount of money to support people in their rural communities and circles to do small business, the money 100% reaches. And all the Parish Development Funds go through Pearl Bank.

3. What other kinds of technology improvements has the bank leveraged in terms of digital banking, mobile platforms or agent networks to improve customer experience and accessibility?

When we started the journey with Wendi, we were looking for a way to automate financial inclusion. You can’t go on opening branches everywhere, it’s very expensive.

So, we realized that if you look at the East African region, telcos have managed to penetrate faster than banks. At that time, Uganda had about 15 million bank accounts, yet banks have been here for 100 years and telcos had over 30 million, twice the number of bank accounts with number of subscribers. So, we started our study internally and we were trying to understand what they do differently that we can do.

Then we realized that bank traditional technology -and that is for banks globally- only enables interaction with an existing customer, whereas telcos developed this wallet technology that allows anyone to interact with a telco, even if they are not a customer.

So, we looked into that solution that can enable us to access everyone. They don’t have to be customers. And after you have access to everyone, you can allow other banks to integrate at no cost. We have seven financial institutions that have integrated.

I’ll give you an example: a bank is based here in Kampala and lends to a businessman 400 kilometres from here, where they don’t have a branch. If they integrated onto Wendi platform, that businessman can access their bank account.

We say we are a government bank, so our job is also to support the industry, not just the success of Pearl Bank. And for the other banks that have applied, the whole idea was that it’s like a free switch for the banks that you have created. And that is one journey we are on.

Then Wendi itself, we try to make sure that the costs are cheaper than your normal telcos, that way the cost of banking becomes lower even for Ugandans who have embraced telcos. We have integrated remittances, because one of our biggest exports in Uganda is labour. So that people, wherever they are working, as long as some of the partnerships we have are integrated here, they can send money from wherever they are to their families in rural areas, without so many middle people along the way.

Of course it does everything else a bank does. Actually, our advert in local language is “the bank in your hands”. Carry that phone, you have a bank with you.

In terms of technology, we are exploring, like any organization today, how we can leverage AI to improve what we do; in terms of service, but also to lower our cost of doing business. We have an innovation team in-house, and they work throughout the year on different things, but one of the major projects now, is around artificial intelligence.

I believe we may be the first bank with a digital agent in customer service, where there are no human beings. We have Ms. PEARL in customer service, but it’s really not a human being, and that is something we want to build on. The PEARL will have many, many roles to play.

We’ve gone into digital scoring about a year ago, because that is the only way we can reach millions of Ugandans without a physical attempt.

4. Was there a good reception to this new automated system?

Yes, there’s good reception, and what we have to do now is scale these things. The way we have scaled Wendi, we have to scale all these other new innovations. Ugandans are used to the phone. When you push something through the phone, chances of adoption are very high, because they easily understand how telephones work, as opposed to pushing through a laptop.

5. Small businesses are a major driver of economic activity. What financial solutions and support mechanisms is the bank providing to empower SMEs and entrepreneurs?

Today, when you go into an area, you sort out a system. Not a transaction, not a single product, not a single customer.

One of the areas we’ve been so active in the last couple of years is around coffee sector. 

For many years, coffee used to be the number one export in Uganda, and it has fallen down to number two behind gold. We now support not only the exporters, but we are always looking for solutions all the way down to the smallholder farmer. That is one of the sectors that we are very happy to say it doesn’t have too many middlemen. A farmer actually benefits, their life changes around coffee because it’s fluid. There’s no debt; they buy cash and the prices move with the global prices. When prices change globally, the farm price has reacted within a week or two. So, we’ve been very active in terms of coffee sector.

Another area we’ve supported government has been through the large-scale farmers. The government wanted to address food security, so they called us and a few other players to design a product that would enable large-scale farmers access free credit together with the Grand Council here in Uganda.

And we came up with the following system: we provide the capital, government pays for the interests, the cost, for farmers who qualify by meeting certain criteria. And that scheme has run so well, and it is aimed at boosting production in the agriculture space.

We also have many SMEs. Uganda is very interesting; a very big population is in the agriculture space. Even when you meet a typical SME, you’ll find that they have activity related to agriculture. It could be transport, it could be distribution, it could be a shop, it could be trade. There is a lot in that space. So, a lot of SMEs, when we get a single player, say an exporter, the first thing we always ask is the ecosystem around them. Who supplies you these products, who transports for you, because all these people support livelihoods. So, you’ll find when you support that SME, the transporter has a tomboy on the truck, the tomboy has a wife, the driver has a wife, the fuel station they go to, those people have families and there’s economic activity. If you go to a miller that has five employees, at the end of the day if you want to impact prosperity, you have to go slow on consumption-led borrowing and move more into value addition and production. That’s how you impact the economy.

So, to guide us, we put that under our high-level goals. We have a lot of staff active every day, running the bank, so we have to give them guidance that we foster prosperity in two ways. One, we shall drive sustainable financial inclusion. Two, we shall stimulate entrepreneurship and services. A lot of the SME is around stimulation of entrepreneurship. And we’ve learned that just relying on deposits to grow that space of entrepreneurship is not sufficient. That’s why we’ve started bringing in partners to support us on this journey, so that we can scale faster.

Uganda’s private sector credit to GDP is one of the lowest in the region. If you look at the total loan book for supervised financial institutions, it is 13% of the gross domestic product. In Kenya is 31% of the economy. You see the difference? Meaning we have a lot of work to do, but it’s also a massive opportunity.

6. What kind of partnerships or new growth areas are central to Pearl Bank’s long-term strategy?

We want partners who can join us in the journey to support the real economy. The real economy is the one that actually delivers growth, and we are also aligning ourselves around the tenfold, in terms of the lending activity we are doing.

Strategically, everything is around agribusiness, tourism development, science and innovation, and mining, including oil and gas. So different partners will choose what they want to do. Normally partners come, once you showcase what you do, they choose where their focus will be based on the range of things you do.

So far, there is a lot of interest around value addition, there is a lot of interest around MSME, micro, small and medium-sized enterprises.

7. How do you reach these partners or these investors coming into the country?

We need a lot of support in terms of visibility, especially that it’s a new brand, it’s a young brand. So far, one of the things we have that everyone has loved is our integrated report. It talks a lot about what we do, and we share it widely. We even have a soft copy online.

It talks a lot about how we add value to the economy and to customers, how we create value. And that has helped us in terms of communication, that whoever comes to interact with us, it’s very easy for them to know what we do. We don’t have to over explain ourselves, and then the conversation progresses.

But we have to reach out. There are many players, a few who are based here, and we’ve had conversations. There are also a few offshore, and we’ve started having conversations as well. But that opportunity I’ve talked about around banks having under lent in this country, I think that’s a massive opportunity.

8. And then what about for private investors? What opportunities are there for private investors?

There is a lot, because if you look at the drivers of the economy, they are all high growth, and they are all not fully developed.

Everyone talks about, for example, oil and gas. But if you look at the minerals that have not yet been explored in Uganda, the opportunity is much bigger than oil and gas. Much bigger. We have a lot of minerals. And the government policy now is that minerals have to be processed before they leave the country. So that you export value, not just raw material. That is a very big opportunity around the mineral space.

I think also tourism. Uganda used to receive more than a million visitors before COVID. And then COVID took us backward. But now it has picked up again. Uganda’s tourism is massive. For example, I understand Uganda has more bird species than the entire North America. Apart from the weather, you have things like tree climbing lions in Queen Elizabeth, which is very rare. We have the white rhinos in Kidepo. Of course, the mountain gorillas, those are the most popular. There is a lot of stuff, our products range around tourism. So, there is a lot of opportunities. Many areas are not fully developed, but the opportunities are massive.

Then the innovation space. Uganda has not done a lot of business outsourcing, compared to Kenya. They have entered that space quite a lot. I think in Uganda, it’s just starting. Because the labour is very affordable in Uganda, and yet the skills are here. You will find that a tech who costs $2,000 or $3,000 a month in Europe, may cost you 30% of that in Uganda. And the skillset is exactly what you’re looking for. But that’s an area that is underexplored.

9. As Uganda’s financial sector matures, what message of confidence would you share about investing in Uganda?

There’s a lot of stability in Uganda, which has been stable for the last 40 years.

When I was living in the UK, people used to ask me things of the 70s, even from before I was born. But that’s not Uganda now, even though it’s still stuck in people’s minds. It’s very stable now. The environment is good for investors. We don’t have restrictions on dividends, repatriation. It’s a liberalized economy. They allow the foreign exchange to play. There are no restrictions. They allow interest rates to play according to the market. It’s really a very open market.

And it’s always good to join the start of a journey. The returns are usually higher when you come early and before things actually form together. Once everything is clear, you won’t make returns. But this is a very good time for an investor to come in whatever space that requires, whether it is mining, tourism, energy, agriculture.

We have a very big advantage in terms of agriculture. We have a lot of natural fertile land. And that’s an area in which, if you want to boost exports, you can be very competitive internationally right from here. There are so many opportunities for an investor to play in. They need to come and do a visit, do their fact-finding mission on the ground.

Registration of business has also been made easy. We have a one-stop centre that offers everything: business registration and revenue authority, all in one. It’s business services for any investor. It’s quite easy to do business.

Yes, you’ll find a few challenges. Infrastructure is not as good as in an advanced economy. But for me, those are the opportunities.

10. What makes Pearl Bank the partner of choice in Uganda?

Any investor would love a bank that is in the lead in terms of sustainability. Pearl Bank is the number one bank in the country when it comes to sustainability. That is doing business while delivering impact. Impact to the population, impact to the economy. The bank is so deliberate in that journey.

It may not be the number one in terms of size or capital, but in terms of impact -an impact led institution- that is where any investor who wants to partner with such an institution will see Pearl Bank as the place to be.