Equity bank has today announced that their USSD service (*247#) can now be accessed by all customers on all mobile networks. The USSD service gives users access to a seamless banking experience.
With the revamped USSD service, customers on Safaricom, Airtel, Telkom and Equitel can easily access Equity bank services.
This announcement comes a few weeks after Equity introduced one till number that will allow merchants to receive digital payments efficiently. Through this till number, merchants will be able to receive payments from different channels or mobile wallets from the single till number.
Some of the new features on the revamped USSD service include:
- Access to instant loans that range between Kes.100 and Kes.3million
- Self-registration or onboarding of both existing Equity and non-Equity customers on the service
- Customers being able to save or maintain recipient’s bank details which makes it easy and convenient to do repeat transactions.
Since the advent of COVID-19, individuals and businesses are rapidly adopting the use of technology to confront the challenges and risks posed by the pandemic to remain afloat and continue to serve their customers.
During the release of the 2021 third-quarter results, Equity Group Managing Director and CEO, Dr. James Mwangi said “COVID has acted as a tail wind to the adoption of digital banking making us transform into a Big Tech in the financial services sector. The Group is increasingly shifting from its legacy brick and mortar model of branches and ATMs to self-service model of client’s own electronic devices or third-party infrastructure as more customers opting for cashless transactions.”
Advancements in technology continue to transform the banking sector and Equity has leveraged on this to give customers choice and freedom to access and operate their accounts. This has progressively led to consumers preferring to carry out most of their transactions digitally as opposed to going to the branches. According to the recently – released 2021 Q3 results, out of the 975.1 million transactions processed for the 9 months in the year, only 30.1 million transactions or 3% of all transactions were handled by branches and ATMs with the digital bank handling and processing 945 million transactions or 97% of all the transactions with the self-service customers’ own device mobile channel handling and processing 90% of digital transactions.