ALAT By Wema, the first fully digitalized bank in Nigeria, has been named the Overall Best Mobile App in the Nigerian FinTech Awards 2022, beating the other FinTech apps nominated alongside it in the category in the platform’s shortlist. The announcement was made at the award ceremony in Lagos, on Friday 4 November 2022.

In its 10th year, the Nigerian Fintech Awards was founded by Fintech Africa, one of Africa’s oldest and most influential publications on financial technology to honour excellence in product designs and service delivery in financial technologies. The Overall Best Mobile App, won by ALAT By Wema, according to the organizers, is in recognition of the digital bank’s contribution to the Fintech world.

ALAT By Wema, the first fully digital bank in Nigeria, was launched in May 2017 by Wema Bank Plc, the country’s oldest indigenous commercial bank, to drive transformation and redefine experiential banking in the Nigeria’s banking sector. In its first year, ALAT by Wema gained over 250,000 customers who were responsible for the well over NGN 1.6 billion ($4.48m) deposits. In 2018, the bank closed in the N1 billion ($2.78m) mark in terms of deposits into savings accounts.

Olusegun Adeniyi Chief Digital Officer, Wema Bank expressed his joy at the award, saying that the honour is only the icing on the cake of transformation that ALAT By Wema has brought to the banking industry in Nigeria.

“We are delighted at being named as the Overall Best Mobile App by the august platform, which is dedicated to honoring excellence in financial technologies and services companies and products. The award is complimentary to the excitement that the multi-award-winning app has brought to its numerous individual and corporate subscribers.” 

He informed that ALAT By Wema, which matches customers’ lifestyles, is helping its subscribers save more with access to exclusive group and personal savings, free debit cards, and up to four percent annual interest in savings. 

Adeniyi said that since its launch in May 2017, ALAT By Wema, the branchless and paperless bank has reduced the stress of having to walk into a branch to open an account by providing a seamless sign-up process using a mobile phone, PC or tablet. The ALAT By Wema app, unlike other banking apps, provides all the banking services the customer could ask for.

“All banking apps only offer some banking services, typically airtime purchases, bill payments and transfers. For example, even with a banking app, customers usually still need to go to a physical bank to get a debit card and activate it, submit documents and often, get some kinds of customer support. This is not the case with ALAT, which was built from scratch to be entirely digital, making all banking services available to the customers anywhere they can access the internet.”