For years, going to the bank meant exactly that: going to the bank. You found the nearest branch, travelled there, waited to be served and then returned to your day. That model has served customers for generations, but it does not always reflect how people live and do business today. A trader cannot repeatedly leave a shop unattended. A farmer may be several kilometres away from the nearest branch. A boda boda rider earns by staying on the road. Banking has to work around these realities, and not the other way around.

That is the thinking behind Pride Bank’s new strategic partnership with Interswitch, officially launched on 22 September 2026. Rather than simply adding another banking product, the partnership expands the places where a Pride Bank customer can actually bank. Through Quickteller Agency Banking and Pride Bank Verve Debit Cards, customers are being connected to thousands of additional financial service and payment touchpoints across Uganda.

The scale is significant. Quickteller brings a network of more than 21,000 agents across Uganda into the picture. Pride Bank customers can access selected everyday banking services through participating agents, extending the Bank beyond its traditional branches and closer to homes, businesses and trading centres. In practical terms, the question for a customer increasingly becomes less about where the nearest Pride Bank branch is and more about where the nearest available banking touchpoint is.

And these are not merely information or referral points. Customers can make cash deposits, withdraw money, repay loans and pay bills through participating Quickteller agents. Consider a small business owner who receives cash throughout the day and wants to deposit part of those earnings. Instead of closing the business or finding someone to watch it while travelling to a branch, the customer has another option closer to where business is happening. The same applies to a customer who needs to make a loan repayment or settle a bill without reorganising an entire day around the transaction.

This is particularly relevant to the customers Pride Bank serves. Traders, farmers, small business owners and boda boda riders often operate in environments where time away from work has a direct economic consequence. When banking comes closer, convenience is no longer an abstract promise. It can mean one less journey, lower transport costs, more time at the business and easier management of daily finances. The partnership therefore tackles one of the most practical questions in financial inclusion: once people have access to financial services, how easy is it for them to actually use those services in their everyday lives?

There is another person who benefits from this model: the agent. Businesses participating in the Quickteller network can offer financial services within their communities while generating additional income through commissions and attracting increased customer traffic. That creates an interesting cycle of value. A neighbourhood business becomes a financial access point, the customer gains a more convenient place to bank, and the business itself gains another source of commercial activity. Banking becomes part of the local economy rather than something that only happens inside a banking hall.

But bringing banking closer to home solves only one part of the equation. Pride Bank customers also move. They travel between towns, conduct business in different parts of Uganda, visit family and make purchases far from their usual banking points. The partnership therefore extends beyond agency banking to another important development: the rollout of the Pride Bank Verve Debit Card.

Through Pride Bank’s integration with the Interswitch network, Verve cardholders can access their money through more than 650 ATMs operated by financial institutions on the network across Uganda. That changes the geography of cash access for a Pride Bank customer. Being away from a Pride Bank location does not necessarily mean being away from access to your money. The wider ATM network travels with the customer in a way that a traditional branch network cannot.

The card also changes how customers can spend. Pride Bank Verve Debit Cards can be used at more than 20,000 Point of Sale locations across Uganda, giving cardholders a considerably wider network through which they can pay for goods and services at participating merchants. The card is built on EMV Chip and PIN technology, bringing security into the same conversation as convenience. Wider access is useful, but customers also need confidence in the channels through which they are accessing and spending their money.

For Veronica Namagembe, Managing Director of Pride Bank, this is ultimately about making the Bank fit more naturally into customers’ lives. At the launch, she emphasised that customers should not have to organise their lives around banking. The partnership allows Pride Bank to extend its reach and give customers greater choice in how and where they access financial services, whether they are traders running businesses, farmers managing their incomes or customers moving across the country.

That customer focus is also central to Interswitch’s role in the partnership. Moris Seguya, Country Manager, Interswitch Uganda, described the collaboration as an example of how technology and payments infrastructure can respond to practical customer needs. Connecting Pride Bank to Quickteller’s network of more than 21,000 agents and the broader Interswitch acceptance network means extending banking beyond conventional touchpoints and putting services closer to the places where customers already live and transact.

There is a bigger business story behind those numbers. Interswitch is bringing payments infrastructure, expertise and ecosystem reach, while Pride Bank brings its banking experience and understanding of the customers and communities it serves. The partnership is designed to support Pride Bank’s ambitions around customer experience, innovation and sustainable growth, while creating the infrastructure needed to deliver those ambitions at scale. It is not technology being introduced simply for the sake of having another digital or payment solution. It is infrastructure being applied to the practical question of how banking can become easier to reach and use.

Put all the pieces together and the change becomes easier to see. A Pride Bank customer can make selected transactions through a Quickteller agent within their community, access cash through a network of more than 650 ATMs and use a Verve Debit Card at more than 20,000 POS locations across Uganda. The customer is no longer interacting with Pride Bank through one channel or one type of location. The relationship increasingly follows the customer from the neighbourhood shop, to the ATM, to the merchant checkout.

That is perhaps the most important story from the launch. Pride Bank and Interswitch are not simply adding more places to transact; they are changing what proximity to a bank can mean. Being “close to your bank” no longer has to mean living or working near a branch. It can mean having an agent within your community, an ATM available when you travel, or a payment card accepted when it is time to make a purchase. As Pride Bank and Interswitch continue to deepen the partnership and scale the solutions across Uganda, the ambition is increasingly clear: wherever customers live, work, trade or move, banking should never be too far away.