National Social Security Fund (NSSF) members can now make their social security transactions at the nearest agent in their neighborhood without visiting the Fund offices.
This comes after the Fund unveiled agency service which Richard Byarugaba, NSSF Managing Director, said is part of the Fund’s channels that will further ease access to their services for its members.
“We have a branch network of 19 branches serving over 2 million customers. With this service, it means that NSSF Customers don’t need to travel long distances to access our offices, but can make transactions at the nearest bank agent at flexible working hours.”
In addition, the service is expected to reduce the Fund’s operation and administrative costs especially in establishment of temporary service centers where it doesn’t have footprint.
The service is in partnership with dfcu Bank and the Agent Banking Company (ABC) Limited. dfcu will provide its bank agents to facilitate the NSSF transactions countrywide while the Agent Banking Company provides the technology that links all bank agents countrywide.
Mathias Katamba, dfcu Bank Managing Director said the service is in line with their strategy to increase financial inclusion in the country. “We are proud to be the first bank to partner with NSSF on this front. Adding social security transactions to our list of financial services through the agency banking model, gives us an opportunity to further extend more financial services, more conveniently, to our customers, the under banked or unbanked population. Partnerships such as this one with NSSF are testament to our commitment on delivering on dfcu’s brand promise of making more possible.”
The ABC (U) Ltd Chief Executive Officer, Richard Yego, said, “We are happy to add another service to the Shared Agent Banking platform and ultimately supporting agents earn more from their businesses. This interoperable technology platform is safe, quick and convenient and we pledge to ensure the selected agents for the service adhere to the confidentiality clauses in this partnership in order to safeguard the NSSF member data”
For now, members can only be able to submit their NSSF contributions at the 300 dfcu agent locations. In the near future, the agents will provide other NSSF services like employer and individual or employee registrations.
Other NSSF collection channels for contributions available to customers include the E-collections Portal that allows employers to remit their employees’ contributions directly to their NSSF accounts through the Bank, the Mobile Money Platform for contributions payment by the Fund’s Voluntary savers, the NSSF Go App and NSSF Payway.
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According to Byarugaba, the service is being implemented it in two phases: –
Integrating with ABC and dfcu Bank: has been concluded and 300 dfcu Agents are now ready to collect NSSF contributions.
Integrating with all our e-collection banks: This process is on-going and upon completion will enable over 10,000 bank agents to receive contributions and register employers and employees with NSSF.
Benefits
Since there are over 10,000 bank agents countrywide, upon completion of phase 2, the Fund members will conveniently access our services right in their neighbourhood.
Secondly, the Fund has in the past, set up temporary outreach centers at UGX30m per month. With the agency network, the cost to serve reduces from UGX4,170 to UGX3,100/=, thereby unlocking more value to members.
For the Fund, they are expanding their footprint without incurring expansion costs, this is very important in the face of the on-going discussions on the NSSF Amendment bill that seeks to make social security mandatory to all 16Million working Ugandans.
