Many people can relate to the euphoria and angst experienced when a credit or debit (respectively) SMS notification is received on their mobile device. However, many people do not know that the ability of their financial institution to keep them up to date with the activities on their accounts has been made possible through state-of-the-art applications that covey messages and emails to customers.
One company that offers this particular service to banks and other institutions such as utilities is Wirepick Inc. Financial Insight had the privilege of visiting the Lusaka Zambia office that is currently headed tech veteran Frank Banda.
According to the company’s website, Frank is described as at Creative and Results driven technology leader with over 17 years’ experience that can be summed up to include core banking from his days as a banker, Strategic Planner from his years in management, and project executioner for different types of financial services assignments. Wirepick also conducts project management and IT consultancy with various businesses
The need to keep customers informed about the status of the affairs of their digital assets is the business problem that Wirepick has positioned itself to resolve. According to the company’s CEO Frank Banda, “they chose to build resources and capabilities around messaging solutions to enterprises because there has always been a huge demand for enterprising companies to disseminate information via SMS”.
This inspired the belief system of the management team who wanted to tap into that space and enable companies to communicate to their customers. However, over time this has changed. What started off as simply messaging has become so much more and has been inspired by technology. and decide we have the capabilities to do other things e.g software development solutions for businesses depending on their need is what we are doing very well, core banking systems because most of us are from banking background, project managing, process automation, looking to do more in the future.
With many banks undergoing inward and outward digital transformation, they need solutions that not only address customer needs, but also solutions that augment process automation that is integrated with core banking systems. At present, its leadership has over 8 years in the banking sector, 11 years in the Information Sector and 10 years in accounting.
With a blend of qualifications that brings credibility to a sector that demands the highest of standards, Wirepick has ambitions of being a technology partner of choice for most organizations in Zambia and across Africa. “We want to be at the centre of transformation in the different organisations, play a strong part in the strategy. When an organisation is thinking, where are going? they should think of wirepick as an enabler to achieve those objectives, that’s our goal” were some of the sentiments shared with Financial Insight during a sit-down interview with CEO Frank Banda, with this Author.
The self-belief in the Management team is evident. Their value system includes being able to deliver, over and above expectations. This includes positioning themselves as the partner of choice and being able to deliver according to expectations whilst incorporating value addition.
Wirepick also places people management as an important aspect on delivering on their strategy. According to the Executive the company’s position on labor is that, “they need to have a skilled workforce because they have clients depending on them to provide the right solutions for them continuously”. He further stated that the company “tries to get the best of the cream and tries to push them to further their skills and studies so that they remain strong in the space that we operate in”.
Wirepick also has an intense graduate program to help in beefing up its internal skills. “Good thing is we work a lot with graduates from university and to support them we have experienced staff from different parts of Africa in the countries we operate so that is the model that we use”. However, despite the astuteness of the internal staff development programs, the customer is always at the center in order to ensure good service delivery for its customers. “But in a nutshell we pay attention to having the right skills on board to continue delivering very well to our customers.”
