By Emmanuel Uffot
In its bid to empower women as part of its Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR Access Bank has gone into partnership with the Federal Ministry of Women Affairs on the 50 Million Women Speak Project with ECOWAS designed to empower women in business across Africa on skills required to build sustainable businesses.
The initiative, according to the bank is a brand dedicated to inspiring, connecting and empowering women across every stage of their lives either as women in business, women and family or young professionals. According to the bank’s Executive Director, Retail Banking Division, Victor Etuokwu “The world at large has gone global and in a short while, even the most basic things will require digital expertise. We have gone into this partnership to reiterate Access Bank’s focus on the women and to help them move with this digital evolution to strengthen their businesses”
The pioneer program was held in Lagos on July 29, 2019 with more than 100 women in attendance while the subsequent trainings is expected to cut across the six regions in Nigeria. The initiative is one among the chains of empowerment initiatives and customer friendly products the bank has churned out after its landmark merger with Diamond Bank.
Only recently, Access Bank launched and opened up its USSD channel (*901#) to all Nigerians to enable the instant opening of DiamondXtra accounts from mobile devices. The DiamondXtra USSD channel option (*901#) allows customers, and potential customers, conveniently open a DiamondXtra account, confirm the number of tickets they have in a particular draw, and also find out the date for the draws from their mobile devices. Introducing the USSD channel account opening option, Etuokwu, said, said the bank’s focus and business is “all about our customers as our success can be directly attributed to their success. We have helped millions of people save with DiamondXtra and have rewarded thousands over the last 10 years, with this year being the eleventh edition. To encourage more people to save, we have digitized the scheme to accommodate customers who are not able, for one reason or another, to go the branch to open a DiamondXtra account. New customers can simply dial *901#, follow the prompts to open a DiamondXtra account and fund with a minimum of N5,000 to be one of our lucky winners. To join our winning train, all you need to do is to save up, if you are already a DiamondXtra customer, or open a DiamondXtra account with just ?5,000 and save multiples of ?5,000 to increase your chances of winning”, he stressed.
