Standard Bank has made its global wallet, Shyft, available on its Android and Apple app stores, enabling its customers to make personal foreign exchange transactions from their mobile devices.
Shyft simplifies the process of making foreign exchange transactions, by eliminating the paperwork and queuing at the bank for one to make foreign exchange arrangements. Customers can now buy currency conveniently, whenever and wherever they are.
Customers are able to buy and store four currencies at a time suitable to them. They can then either use the currencies to make online purchases using their virtual cards, send or pay an international beneficiary or use the Shyft physical card to swipe or withdraw from an ATM when travelling overseas.
Because of its transformative influence on banking, the app took bronze in the Most Disruptive Innovation category of the 2016 Efma-Accenture Distribution & Marketing Innovation Awards. The awards are designed to create global awareness of best practices in the retail banking distribution and marketing arena.
The criteria against which initiatives are judged by 1 200 professional bankers around the world include the originality of the innovation, its impact on the industry, and its adaptability for use in other markets and countries.
“Shyft is very much in line with our focus as a bank on enhancing the banking experience for ordinary citizens,” says Richard de Roos, head of foreign exchange at Standard Bank. “It puts the customer’s needs at the centre of what we do.
“It’s also a superb example of the way we as an African bank can harness innovation from fintechs anywhere in the world and put the convenience and simplicity that innovation makes possible quite literally in the hands of our customers. No bank can work fast enough to do that on its own. Thus, Shyft demonstrates our relentless pursuit of the best for our clients, whether from within our own organisation or from the broader world of bright minds and ideas.”
