An Assessment of Benefits and Challenges of Information and Communication Technology to Office Managers in the Banking Industry

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to assess the benefits and the challenges of information and communication technology (ICT) to office managers in the banking industry, in order to ascertain the level of success of ICT to the industry, using questionnaire administered to bank staff and customers (n = 130) of Access Bank Plc and Skye Bank Plc in Bida, Niger State, Nigeria. The findings indicated that the office managers of the banks have high rate of exposure to modern information technology IT. The banks staff opined that IT has resulted to reduction in the cost of operations. About 50 percentile of the staff ranked the rate at which IT enhances the confidentiality of information as high. However, the study led to the inference that the staff of the two banks have very low rate for acquiring new skills through capacity development. About 60 percentile of the bank staff have very high tendency to respond to changes in innovation brought about by IT; while 75 percentile indicated that the use of IT by office managers leads to very low rate of fraudulent access to stored information. Also, 58 percentile of the bank customers rated the ease of access to their account as excellent due to the use of IT; and ranked IT excellent in terms of the time saved by customers in accessing their accounts. In addition, the customers rated the use of IT in boosting inter-bank relationship as very good. The challenges of IT to customer service as stated by the customers are: fraud by bank staff (0.5%), delay in inter-bank transaction (10%), poor communication network (40%), poor computer literacy (29.5%), and bridge in the relationship between staff and customers (20%). Therefore, workshop and enlightenment is needed for capacity development on ICT in order to maximally utilize the benefits.