East African Business Week

KIGALI, RWANDA -  Banque Populaire du Rwanda (BPR), is investing heavily in electronic banking with the aim to close the year with 100 Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) for its 1.3 million plus customers to access banking services conveniently.
BPR introduced electronic banking department in July last year to be the core of ATM banking, Mobile Banking and Internet Banking with an aim of making banking accessible to its customers through available technologies. It has also invested in its own switch to increase efficiency of ATMs.
With the department headed by Jean Paul Muramira, BPR currently offers ATM Banking and Mobile Banking, which is a new product in Rwanda's banking sector and it plans to launch internet banking next year.
Mr. Muramira says there was need to change the way banking was done at BPR in order to follow the government's policy to move from a cash based economy to a cashless one. Initially, BPR, like other Rwandan banks, before launching E-Banking, it was offering conventional banking services that require customers to visit banking halls. Although this is still happening, the pace is reducing.
Muramira, a young IT professional at the helm of E-Banking at BPR says that when the department started in July 2010, the bank had 3 ATMs and 1,500 debit ATM cards in the market.
One year and four months later, PBR has 43 functioning ATMs and it is deploying additional 67 to close the year with 100 ATMs, Muramira said. Monthly transactions on ATMs exceed Rf3bn ($5 m). The Bank has so far distributed 68,000 debit cards and targets to have 100,000 cards distributed by end of the year and between 200,000 and 250,000 cards by end of 2012.