Polaris Bank shone at the weekend, as its home-grown platform, VULTe, won for the third time, Nigeria’s ‘Best Digital Bank of the Year’ prize at the BusinessDAY’s Banks And Other Financial Institutions (BAFI) Awards.
  
The financial institution also carted home the ‘Best MSME Bank of the Year’ diadem.VULTe is a digital banking platform designed to enable customers to consummate every banking transaction – from account opening, through requesting for certain categories of loans – to generating statements. It also connects customers to lifestyle trends and social events.
  
The product is an all-in-one solution created to offer the most convenience for customers and provide solutions to everyday’s challenges of accessing financial services and more.
  
In the last one year, VULTe, which hitherto caters more to individual customers, has enhanced capabilities to render seamless self-services to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), high net worth and retail customers.
 
The over 40 million MSME operators in the country can now use the platform to access collateral-free loans for personal and business purposes, where eligible entrepreneurs and SME operators could apply and get up to N20 million in a space of five minutes.
  
While presenting the award, the organisers observed that the selection/review committee voted VULTe for outperforming peers across eight metrics.

They include strength of strategy for attracting and gaining digital customers; accelerated user engagement; success in getting clients to use digital offerings; growth of digital customers and platform security.
 
Others are breadth of product offerings for retail and corporate clients; evidence of tangible benefits gained from digital initiatives and web/mobile site design, as well as intuitiveness and functionality.
  
Retail & Digital Banking Divisional Head, Dele Adeyinka, who received the prize, pledged: “Polaris Bank will continue to impact MSME digitally through innovative banking products, affordable finance and creative services that add significant value for the greater good of all stakeholders.”