ZB rebrands

ZB Financial Holdings has embarked on a major rebranding exercise, which will see the group adopting a new model that will centralise operations within branches as it moves to be customer-centric and strengthen brand loyalty by its clientele.

This exercise will see a huge investment in the conversion of branches to "One Digital ZB Service Centres" that will house operations of ZB Bank, ZB Building Society, ZB Life Insurance, ZB Reinsurance, ZB Capital and ZB Transfer Secretaries at a one-stop shop.

Titled the "Peregrine Shift", the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange listed banking group's transformation programme started early this year and is now in full swing with branch renovations, digital upgrades and staff undergoing training.

According to ZB, the undertaking is set to transform the group's operations in ways that will deliver convenience and increased value to its customers given that they will now be able to access all its services from one touch point.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Peregrine Shift launch on Monday ZB group chief executive officer, Shepherd Fungura said the group's personnel had been subjected to enormous retraining to meet the expectations of the rebranding process that seeks to lower service acquisition costs for customers.

"We have gotten ourselves in a transformation drive, which gives us the ability to access our customers much more conveniently, instead of coming with what is already designed we now want to engage, understand and design solutions together with the customers.

"As such, we have ensured that our personnel go through a training programme for the up-skilling and multi-skilling of our personnel so that we are able to deal much better with customers than currently," Mr Fungura said.

Critically, through the reformation drive, the bank said it would be focusing on financially supporting the growth of the country's key economic sectors like agriculture, mining and infrastructure development.

"Through our rebranding exercise, we would want to go into some key sectors of the economy like mining, agriculture, infrastructure and tourism, where we would want to support those sectors by way of providing facilities like working capital for mines, provide schemes for those in agriculture maybe through contract farming so that we are part of Government efforts as a bank.

"One of our strategic objectives is that we become a corporate citizen in the manner we do our business, by supporting efforts in those areas to make the Government's vision be realised, we are deeply rooted in Zimbabwe, thus we want to support efforts we think are useful to Zimbabwe going into the future," he added.

The rebranding process is intended to give enhanced customer care, balancing digitisation and physical outlets given that internet access is not yet universal and connectivity often erratic for the Zimbabwean market.