The New GTBank’s Habari Wants to be Your New Social Bestfriend

Financial institution powered apps are known to provide the regular banking services/products. But Nigeria’s leading financial institution, GTbank is taking a huge leap in a different direction. The bank recently launched an all-in-one social mobile app, Habari.

What is Habari?

The wait is over, now you can download #Habari for:
Unlimited access to all the music you love & more, amazing shopping deals & discounts and exciting ways to find friends.

— Guaranty Trust (@gtbank) November 24, 2018

Habari is a GTbank powered platform for music, shopping and lifestyle contents. The mobile app is said to be “a simple, smart and exciting digital app that adds value to users’ lives. It is the first of its kind created by a financial institution.

The app is geared towards providing its users direct access to the largest catalogue of local and foreign music and videos online. It also gives access to books that cut across all literary genres, a seamless shopping experience and an exciting way to connect with friends. All these can be accessed by users irrespective of the bank they use.

So in simple terms, the app is a combination of your Youtube, Spotify, Jumia and yes, a bank app.

Getting Started on Habari

Registering on the Habari platform requires user’s details: Names, Username, Date of Birth, Email and Phone Number and log-in password. An OTP (One Time Password) is sent to your email or phone number to confirm the user after which you are required to enter your Habari PIN (for your wallet transfers and shopping payments).

After which the user is welcomed into the world of be many things.

 Habari as a Platform for Music, Video and Book Contents

As a social and lifestyle inclined app, Habari heads straight for the core – providing entertainment contents for its users. The app allows new users select up to 7 genre of contents – music, videos, news and books, they would like to acquaint themselves with.

Although accessing these contents on the app is subscription based, the app provides a first time user with a 24-hour free access to all its contents. This I believe is to get the user to know what they are paying for. After that, users would be required to subscribe to channels that provide them with the contents they like, with a monthly fee ranging between N400-N1500.

Users can sign up to become merchants and put up contents for other users

Though recently launched, channels on the app already boasts of quality contents for enthusiasts including songs from top artists like Simi, Burna Boy and Davido.

Habari as a Chat App

Another interesting feature on the app is that it allows for users to meet new friends and chat on the app. Friends can be added on the app by – syncing contacts, inviting friends, checking for people nearby, friend radar, shaking your phone or scanning another user’s QR code.

Checking for people nearby happens to be the only one that worked for me.

Just like your Facebook/Snapchat, friend requests can be sent and accepted by other users.

Habari as an Ecommerce App

Like every e-commerce platform, Habari also allows for users to shop on its platform. Contents ranging from clothings, phones, accessories, games and several others can be purchased via its platform.

Also, users can also sign up to become merchants and put up goods for sale.

Pay with Habari!

GTbank didn’t fail to leave a speck of its true identity as a financial institution on the app. As expected, the ‘Pay’ option allows you pay for services, top up airtime and data, transfer to other users etc. All of this could be done with the Habari Wallet which is topped-up from the user bank account.

In addition to that, Habari also allows users to open a GT bank account from the mobile app.

My Take on Habari

At 44mb, the app is designed with a clean user interface as well as a seamless navigation experience. It’s a really cool app from my point of view, and already I’m vying for it to become many people’s favorite. This is because, nobody wants several apps performing a single different function, when they can have one doing all (except, of course some exceptions).

My major concern though is the contents on the platform – providing enough contents for users to view/purchase through merchants, can GTbank pull this off efficiently? Well that is left to be seen. Already the app, seems to be having lots of favourites, with over 1000 downloads and 55 reviews on Playstore of which all are positive.

If you want to give it a shot to becoming your new all-in-one social app, Habari is available for download on Android and iOS.