REVIEW: Is This The New First Bank?

Written by The Editor

A while back, I was commissioned (in my day job as a communications expert) to do a research on banks and their use of social media. I used the top banks in Nigeria, UK, South Africa, US and some parts of Europe as my case study but with more focus on the top Nigerian Commercial Banks. First Bank Nigeria was one of the banks in my case study. They didn't do bad but not so well either in their use of social media according to the parameters I used.

Fast forward to many months later (about 3 days ago), I was on Google doing some searches and somehow, the First Bank Nigeria website was one of the search results that popped up (SEO?). I thought “Why not just see what these guys are up to”? It was a surprise what came up, considering the fact that I had been one of those who lambasted First Bank for their below par website.

I had to refresh again to be sure I was really at www.firstbanknigeria.com , there was a revamped site and as the visual person that I am, the pictures drew me in. These were fabulous picture slides; they made First Bank look cool, desirable and aspirational. I had to do a mini-tour (Read that as FULL BLOWN tour as I inspected the site from top to bottom). I decided to go all the way to inspect their social media pages and noticed they had several campaigns going on (WOW).

Now, don’t get me wrong, First bank has always been associated with the word solid, I remember my aunt telling  me the only bank she could put her entire life’s earnings and sleep well was First bank Nigeria and trust me, majority of the richest people in Nigeria feel that way too. But First Bank never used to be associated with the words cool, desirable or known for their aesthetics. Right now, that is no longer the case as First Bank is giving these new generation banks a run for their money.

The new website is good and fine but hey First Bank if you ever read this, you need to make sure that your inner pages meet the standard of the homepages, so the work is not finished. And when you have a nice website, the content needs to be top-notch as well so you must be ready to provide very good content and not those generic stories you have on your media pages.

All these taken into consideration, if First Bank continue with the way they are going: Owning the confidence of the richest, Stepping up on their customer services, Getting more trendy &young and Becoming more social media savvy, the other banks need to be very worried. This new First Bank or what looks like it won’t just own the richest accounts; they will convert the upwardly mobile (which is a major target audience for many new banks) to their organization as well.