- UBA Ghana’s Edwina Darfour Named Banking CX Practitioner of the Year
United Bank for Africa Ghana’s Acting Head of Customer Experience, Edwina Benedicta Darfour, has been named CX Practitioner of the Year — Banking at the 2026 Customer Experience Professionals Ghana Awards, recognising a career that has combined empathy, operational discipline and data-led service improvement.
The award is personal recognition for Ms Darfour, but its wider significance reaches beyond one executive or institution. It comes as Ghanaian banks are increasingly discovering that products, branch networks and digital platforms alone cannot secure customer loyalty. In a market where competing institutions can offer similar accounts, applications and payment services, the quality of the customer’s experience is becoming an important source of differentiation.
For UBA Ghana, the recognition also reinforces the argument that customer experience should not be treated as a ceremonial function activated only when complaints escalate. Properly managed, it is part of the bank’s commercial infrastructure: shaping trust, retention, efficiency and the willingness of customers to deepen their relationship with the institution.
Ms Darfour’s philosophy is straightforward. Great customer experience, she believes, goes beyond delivering acceptable service. It requires understanding people, making their lives easier and ensuring that every interaction leaves a positive impression.
That distinction matters in banking. A customer may rarely think about the complex systems behind a transfer, card transaction or loan application. Yet the individual immediately feels the consequences when those systems fail. A delayed response, unexplained charge or repetitive verification process can weaken trust built over years. Conversely, a complaint handled with empathy and clarity can turn a difficult encounter into evidence that the institution is listening.
Ms Darfour’s career has placed her at precisely that intersection between customer expectations and institutional processes. She has accumulated more than a decade of experience in financial services, with responsibilities spanning feedback management, complaint resolution, digital experience, mystery shopping, service standards and the development of a customer-focused culture.
Before joining UBA Ghana, she worked in a financial contact centre and progressed through several roles to become Team Lead for Quality Assurance and Analytics. That background is significant because contact centres offer an unusually direct view of where financial institutions succeed or fail. Repeated calls about the same difficulty are not merely service incidents; collectively, they are operational intelligence showing where products, communications or processes need repair.
Her experience in quality assurance, performance monitoring and analytics therefore provides a useful foundation for customer-experience leadership. It allows service quality to be examined not only through individual anecdotes but also through patterns: which problems recur, where response times weaken, which channels frustrate users and whether promised improvements are producing measurable results.
At UBA Ghana, Ms Darfour’s remit brings together people, processes and technology. This combination is increasingly important as banking moves onto digital channels. Mobile and online services may reduce the need for customers to visit branches, but they do not eliminate the need for human-centred design. Indeed, digitisation can magnify frustration when an automated process fails and no clear route to assistance exists.
The strongest digital banks are therefore not necessarily those with the most features. They are those that make routine transactions intuitive, explain failures clearly, protect customers without creating unnecessary friction and provide effective human support when technology reaches its limits. Customer experience becomes the discipline that connects technical capability with what customers actually encounter.
UBA Ghana’s recent record gives context to Ms Darfour’s award. KPMG ranked the institution Ghana’s leading retail bank for customer experience in 2022, while it remained among the top three retail banks in 2023. Such recognition suggests that the bank has already built useful foundations, although customer experience is never a finished project. Expectations change quickly, particularly as consumers compare banking applications not only with rival banks but with the speed and simplicity offered by telecommunications, retail and technology companies.
The challenge for UBA Ghana will be to convert awards into durable institutional habits. A strong customer-experience culture cannot depend entirely on the commitment of one department or executive. It must influence product design, employee incentives, technology procurement, risk controls and the language used when communicating with customers. Frontline workers need authority to resolve common problems, while management needs reliable information about the causes of dissatisfaction.
Mystery shopping and customer feedback can help expose gaps between written service standards and actual delivery. Complaint data can reveal emerging operational risks. Digital-journey analysis can identify the exact points at which customers abandon transactions. But these tools matter only when their findings reach decision-makers and lead to changes in processes, staffing or technology.
There is also a broader question for Ghana’s banking industry. Financial institutions have invested heavily in digital transformation, but confidence in digital banking ultimately rests on trust. Customers must believe that their money is secure, their data is protected and their concerns will be addressed fairly. As fraud risks and service disruptions become more sophisticated, customer experience and risk management increasingly overlap.
Ms Darfour’s recognition illustrates why the human dimension of banking remains commercially relevant even as the industry automates. Her stated belief that “customers should always matter” may sound simple, yet applying it consistently across thousands of daily interactions demands systems, measurement and accountability.
For UBA Ghana, the award is both an endorsement and a challenge. It validates the work undertaken to improve customer relationships, while raising expectations for what comes next. The institution must continue simplifying processes, learning from complaints and ensuring that digital convenience does not come at the expense of empathy or accessibility.
Recognition can also strengthen internal accountability. Once a bank publicly presents customer experience as a competitive strength, every unresolved complaint becomes a test of that promise. The award therefore creates pressure to preserve standards as transaction volumes, products and customer expectations expand.
Ultimately, the most valuable lesson from Ms Darfour’s career is that customer experience is not merely about being pleasant. It is about designing a bank around the realities of the people it serves. In a competitive financial market, institutions that understand that principle may win more than awards; they may earn the trust that sustains long-term growth.
