Charles Simutowe, a new Chartered Fellow of the London Foundation of Banking & Finance, talks about the development of his career and the protective role of bankers in an increasingly digital and over-heating world. Article by Ouida Taaffe.
Charles Simutowe, who is a Manager in Risk and Compliance at Zambia Postal Services Corporation, started his career in branch banking before becoming Home Loans Manager at the Head Office of Cavmont Bank, where he dealt with wealthy clients.
In branch banking and in home loans, he points out, you need to be a “people person, who is interested in other people’s welfare” as much as someone who is good at analysing credit risk and managing operations. And the importance of those people skills is not going to go away in a more digital world, he says.
Need for a trusted human adviser
“I’m working more on data protection and data management,” he says. “Boards have to look carefully at how their organisations are hosting information, storing information and preserving customer privacy. I’m very interested in that.”
But his interest in data management comes back to customer service. What makes a good banker, Simutowe says, is someone with “integrity”. “Trust is essential in banking,” he says. “People have to be confident, for example, that their personal financial information will be kept private.”
As the use of AI in financial services grows, Simutowe wants to help ensure that the general public is protected. “Is turning to GenAI good enough when it comes to simple financial advice? I have my reservations,” says Simutowe. “There is a need for a safe environment, for access to a trusted human adviser or people can end up getting scammed.” He points out that a major Ponzi scheme in Zambia, called PMG, which presented itself as an online investment platform, was able to grow partly because other platforms cited it as a good deal – something that a chat bot wouldn’t necessarily question.
“Scammers also use technology,” says Simutowe. “People need to be very careful and not everyone is financially literate. They can end up exchanging their hard-earned cash for nothing.”
Simutowe would like Zambia to offer its citizens properly regulated financial advice, alongside more access to financial literacy schemes. “I think we could do a lot more,” he says. “We have specialised investment advisers who focus on corporates, but they don’t deal with retail customers. We need to broaden the scope of financial advice.”
Becoming a banker
Simutowe’s own interest in financial services started out when he was a small boy impressed by grand bank buildings. “It was very far away from the environment of risk as I understand it now,” says Simutowe.
He joined Cavmont Bank when he finished school and trained with the Zambia Institute of Banking and Financial Services, and the Chartered Institute of Banking. “I became a supervisor within a short time, overseeing back-office work, before I went into customer service and loan management.” The branch work, he says, was a broad mix of retail banking, aspects of corporate banking and also dealing with public sector institutions. At head office, he focused on home loans for the wealthy. Eventually, he became an assurance officer tackling operational risks internal to the bank.
“We were dealing directly with the branch administrators in charge of back-office operations in the branches as well as the IT people supporting them. If there was an upgrade in the computer systems, we were the ones behind the scenes rewriting the manuals,” he says.
That focus on IT and risk management led to Simutowe joining the microfinance sector as Chief Operations Officer, an approved persons role. “I was attracted to being able to look at an entire institution, overseeing all the operations,” he says of the move. “Most of the borrowers were people working for the government, so the collection of loan repayments was automated. What wasn’t automated was dealing with errors, which turned out to be very interesting.”
Mobile wallets and GenAI
Financial services, Simutowe says, is essentially about protecting customers and enabling other industries to flourish. “In Zambia, mobile banking has grown at a far faster rate than traditional banking,” he says. “The number of people with mobile wallets far exceeds those with bank accounts.”
But that doesn’t mean that banks have ceased to matter. Regulation requires the funds in those wallets to be kept secure, which in practice means that they are all held in so-called trust accounts at banks. “A lot more people now effectively have access to banking services because banks are part of the ecosystem that supports the mobile wallet,” says Simutowe. “And the loans provided via mobile wallets are actually provided by banks behind the scenes. All of this means there is a very bright future for the banking sector here, and that the regulator can keep a close eye on things.”
But what about the impact of GenAI on banking in Zambia? “Some roles could be lost to automation, but what I’ve noticed, says Simutowe, “Is that if you don’t prompt an AI tool correctly, you’re in trouble. AI on its own won’t necessarily give you the desired result. You need to know how to use it and what to ask it.”
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Cross-border challenges
Simutowe says that his current employer, the Zambia Postal Services Corporation, is moving away from delivering letters to carrying out ecommerce fulfilment and that it is developing its own e-marketplace and collaborating with other marketplaces – including cross-border. As part of that, Simutowe says, they were recently in talks with the postal provider in the Democratic Republic of Congo to better support cross-border trade.
“Now consumers can order things from other countries on a phone,” says Simutowe. “Cross-border trade isn’t just about big trucks moving things for businesses.”
Reaching net zero
Financial services have a vital role to play in reaching net zero. The Zambian central bank has, Simutowe says, a green financing framework that supports lending to green projects at preferential rates and green bonds are part of the local market.
What sort of net zero investing does Simutowe expect to see in Zambia, which is famous for the grandeur of the Victoria Falls, for its nature reserves, and for its mining?
“Zambia is a hydropower nation, and we are investing heavily in solar power, but we still use diesel,” he says. The main reason for the continued reliance on fossil fuels is that a lot of energy is needed for mining.
“We are mining minerals critical to the energy transition, including those that are used in the batteries for electric vehicles,” says Simutowe, "We’re looking at opening a battery-grade cobalt sulphate refinery, which would be the first in Africa but still rare outside of China.”
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