Teaching Elephants To Tango: Working with Post Banks to Realise their Full Potential

Drawing on MicroSave's seven year history of working with the Kenyan Post Office Savings Bank (KPOSB) and Tanzanian Post Office Bank (TPOB), this paper investigates the relevance and the potential of post banks in serving huge numbers of low income people, and the opportunities and challenges for those who seek to realize this potential. The authors note that primarily there are only two questions that need answering:

• Do alternative financial institutions (AFIs) really serve the poor?
• Is the quality of the service offered by the AFIs adequate enough to make significant contribution to the development goals?

After the comprehensive PEST (political, economic, social and technological) assessments of both the above mentioned banks, the authors list down following lessons learnt, in order of their importance, for those seeking to assist post banks reach their full potential:

• It is important to secure the buy in of the key members of the management team that will act as champions for the changes made;
• It is important to develop and communicate a coherent strategy for the change process using a participatory mechanism;
• Most state owned banks have a tendency to assess themselves by their own standards rather than the rapidly evolving standards of the market, resulting in a slow response to the market place;
• Categorization of State-owned institutions, and salary guidelines within these categories, also creates changes, particularly for key positions and skill-sets that often are difficult to acquire and retain.