CABS to spend $2.5 million on refurbishments

The Central Africa Building Society (CABS), Zimbabwe’s largest mortgage lender, will spend about $2.5 million on branch refurbishments this year as well adding two more branches in Harare’s industrial areas, managing director Simon Hammond said.

CABS, a subsidiary of financial behemoth Old Mutiual Zimbabwe, has the widest branch network countrywide but wants to consolidate its market position through incorporating other banking channels.

“We are planning to spend about $2.5 million on our branch refurbishments this year. We currently have one of the widest branch distribution networks in the country and we are therefore looking more at complementing this network with Agents, ATMs and other channels.

“Our strategy as a bank is to have a strong combination of both the traditional banking channels and the alternative channels which are likely to be more prominent in the future.”

The building societyis targeting to increase paperless transactions by June this year in a bid to improve operational efficiency.

Hammond said the bank has deployed several ATMs and Point of Sale terminals to increase the volume ofelectronic payments.

“We currently have 62 ATMS, about 1 100 POS devices with our Agents, 255 POS devices across our branch network, and a total of about 3,600 POS devices across the retail network in the country.

“We therefore believe that we have put in place adequate infrastructure to allow our customers to transact. We will however continue to explore other points of presence in order to increase our customers’ convenience,” he said

Hammond said while there will be some cost savings related to going paperless, the main objective was to improve operational efficiency in branches. The building society would continue to explore avenues to improve service delivery and enhance customer service.-The Source

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