The Bank of Maldives (BML)’s future vision and strategy is built on the three core pillars of treating customers fairly, digitalization and sustainability, CEO Karl Stumke said on Monday night.
Speaking at the bank’s 40th annual general meeting, Stumke highlighted that “treating customers fairly needs to be central to corporate culture in order to ensure that “our products and services perform to the standard that the customer expects.”
“This year, we have significantly reduced interest rates on our student loans to five percent and reduced the overdue interest fee to two percent per month," he said.
Despite the Federal Reserve increasing interest rates nine times over the past year, the bank has not increased local rates and instead, absorbed these additional costs to ease the interest burden to our customers.
Karl commented that the bank has made progress in digitalization but the effort must continue to reach full automation so that errors can be reduced and give customers the control to decide when, how and where they want to bank.
“We plan to bring positive changes to many of the products and services that currently require manual intervention and at the same time, add new security controls and increase our digital support platforms,” he stated.
On sustainability, Stumke said the bank’s strategy will evolve over time to ensure “we do our part to reduce our impact on the environment.”
“This year, 56 new ATMs are planned to be installed and we will ensure that all are operated through solar panels and all new renovations works to our branches retrofits the use of sustainable energy as far as possible.”
