Diane Gwiza, started her career as a call center agent at I&M Bank, about 14 years ago. But, for the last four years, she has been the head of digital banking operations at the bank.

The department is in charge of implementation of digital solutions at the bank – to ensure that the entire process from opening a bank account and the disbursement of money (loans) among other transactions, is digitised.

She said that, before being promoted to the position of the digital operations head in 2019, she had spent about 10 years working in technology-related services in banking at I&M Bank. Indeed, she moved up the ladder for her banking career advancement.

She shared her experience and journey as the bank was celebrating the 2023 Women’s Day, an event held in Kigali, on Saturday, March 11. The theme of this year is "DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality.”

Gwiza said that she was eager to learn new things, and that the bank created a conducive environment for her to be able to grow in her career path.

Currently, she indicated, about 80 per cent of the bank customers use its digital solutions, with only 20 per cent still working with old banking systems. She indicated that, this year, they are working on ways to have all the customers adopt digital services.

"All, the digital solutions that we developed have a great contribution to the bank’s overall profit,” she said, pointing out that they digitised processes including opening an account, getting debit and credit card, or a checkbook, and financial transactions such as savings and withdrawals, at the bank.

In the bank’s operations, she said, "we aim to identify the pain points of our customers and work on solving them.”

"The strategy of our bank is to ensure that each of its customers have a bank close to them. We want to take the bank into the hands of the customer, such that they are able to carry out all banking services on telephone, computer (the internet), wherever they are,” she said.

The Head of Human Resources at I&M Bank, Aline Mutambuka, said that it is good that the bank has the technology-driven department called Alternate Banking Channels, which is led by a woman, Diane Gwiza.

The department, she said, always considers what can be done to improve the bank’s digital systems.

Since 2000, she said, technology advancements have been a trend, and as a bank, "we always do actions that create convenience for our customers."

"That is how we created mobile banking, and brought all those systems that are in line with innovation ... so that we are able to better serve our customers,” she observed.

Denyse Zola Ndegeya, joined I&M Bank in July 2019, as the head of central operations. This is the department in charge of, among others, payments (between clients, including banks) within and outside the country, international trade finance, receiving salaries of employees, and making account reconciliation.

Overall, Ndegeya has been working in the banking industry for 23 years.

She served in different capacities starting from an employee in loan service, to working in treasury, a branch manager, and later becoming the head of operations.

When she was a branch manager, she used to face issues that caused delays in delivering services to the clients, and interventions from the operations unit were lacking. She was committed to looking for a way to change the status quo.

To bring improvement in the bank’s work, she backed process automation.

According to her, technology brings in efficiency in banking operations by reducing the time it takes to process a transaction, hence "helping us to provide quick service to our customers.”

"The accounts reconciliation system helped a lot because reconciling data using tools such as Excel, without a technology-enabled system, would take days. But, when there is a reconciliation system, it takes minutes,” she said.

Technology tackles inefficiencies that would result from manual operations, she noted.

Commitment for greater gender equity

Mutambuka said that the financial institution had 427 workers as of the end of February 2023, of which 200 are women, or about 47 per cent of the entire staff.

"For management level, we have reached 30 per cent; but we target to gradually increase that share,” she said.

The bank is considering approaches to achieve gender equity so that women's representation in managerial positions is also increased.