SIERRA LEONE COMMERCIAL BANK MANAGING DIRECTOR FIDELIS TURAY KEYNOTE ADDRESS AT THE DIGITAL PRODUCT LAUNCHING AT SHANGRILA RESTAURANT ABERDEEN/LUMLEY BEACH ON FRIDAY 29TH MARCH, 2019

Greetings

It is my pleasure and esteemed honor to stand before you today to enlighten you with some great news about the Sierra Leone Commercial Bank’s Commitment towards the financial inclusion initiatives, expanding our markets and services to various parts of our nation, as well as ensuring that we maintain our posture as one of the leaders in the financial industry in Sierra Leone.

In light of this, let me start by sharing with you some basic statistics as to our customer base. Though impressive, we strongly believe that we have more work to do until a good majority of the populace is converted as believers in our financial sector.
- In 2013, the bank had on its books a total of 137,945 registered active account holders.
- In 2014, we added another 7,207 registered account holders to the mix bringing the total to 145,152 which is roughly 5.22% growth.
- In 2015, 7,013 new accounts were registered with us bringing the total to 152,165 about 4.8% growth.
- In 2016, we saw a significant growth due to bold initiatives that management took to embrace Financial Technologies or FINTECH strategies to further boost our growth levels. An increase of 13,427 new accounts was realized bringing the total up to 165,592 or about 8.8% almost doubling the growth of the previous year.
- In 2017, we had another growth, though not as big as the previous year of 7,210 or about 4.4% to a total of 172,802.
- In 2018, we had another significant growth (our biggest year since 2013) of 21.088 or about 12.2% to a total registered number of accounts to 193,810.
- During the first two months of 2019, we have already seen a growth of about 2.5% or 4,776 registered accounts bringing our total to date to 198,586 accounts.

At SLCB, we do not rest on our laurels. We achieve one standard, and immediately set new standards for ourselves and then get to work to make it happen.

Today, it is my humble pleasure and on behalf of my entire SLCB team to introduce three new products in our digital banking suite that we believe and are confident will propel our growth to even higher levels and position SLCB as one of the great contributors to the financial inclusion agenda. These products aim to meet both individual customers’ and our corporate customers’ needs. We firmly believe that the convenience and ease of doing banking that these products will afford our customers are going to be second to none in the industry.

Address all present - I hereby give you the following:

- MI YONE ONLINE BANKING- A very easy to use and very convenient banking application that runs on any mobile device including laptops and desktop computers to bring the convenience of our banking services wherever you are.

- MI YONE MOBILE APP - is an application that can be downloaded by any SLCB customers with a smart phone or tablet on to their mobile device, for both the android or apple platforms. The application provides a host of capabilities that customers can then use the convenience of their fingertips to access many of our banking services. Again, they can do all of these from the comfort of their home/office or anywhere in the world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

- WI YONE ONLINE DIRECT - This is for our corporate customers. This application allows them to pay their employees, salary advance and other banking functions relevant to any business organization.

These products Ladies and Gentlemen are expected to expand financial services to the non-formal sectors of the economy through automation and electronic forms of intermediation and hence address the low level of financial inclusion and in the process also raise domestic revenue.

I also want to take this opportunity to remind everyone present that our MI YONE TELLER (the personal mobile banking agent) and the MI YONE KIOSK (banking in a box) are still available and running very strong to reach even more people.

I now invite the Head of Digital Services to show us the magic of these products.

Thank you for your attention.