Banking The Unbanked; A Glimpse of The Nigerian Mind
Humans are blessed with ideologies, most of which are to make them live in the free will they naturally possess. Meanwhile, our actions are an eruption of an in-depth thought process that has been identified and redefined to please, adapt or improve our society and most importantly ourselves.
Our ideologies are the foundation of most of our innovation, whether it is to support the theories that we were nurtured by or to create a disruption that’ll leave a significant landmark. An ideology-motivated action is not far-fetched even in tech, be it statistically-based or blatantly self-inspired.
There have been many innovations and disruptive plans that have seen the light of day, generating the question “how does someone think of this?” This is what we see every other day, when a startup launches, a fintech branches out to a new market, a business creates a new product and many more.
Most of the time, we ask ourselves “how do they come up with this kind of idea?’, somewhere from the blue sky, someone is thinking of how to serve dinner using a drone, or how to bank an individual even when they have little details in the financial sector. Someone has tapped into his or her ideology and is either disrupting it or supporting it.
Although this has become a norm, we will probably go about our business without identifying what has occurred behind a new innovation. Recently in the African technology ecosystem, some features were launched and questions were followed up.
The Unbanked
Statistically, total financial inclusion is yet to be the order of the day in Nigeria. It has been reported, that the NIBSS released a report, stating that as of the 29th of May 2022, there are still about Thirty-Seven million Nigerian adults were yet to have an active bank account. Nigeria has a population of about Two Hundred and Six Million people, which means about 18% of the population are yet to have financial activity, data or existence in the bank.
The question now is “how do financial institutions include a such hand full of the population in their fulfilment and satisfactory plans?” how do they encourage them to bank or even keep banking, especially without enough background data to study the attribute of the unbanked? This is where Ideologies propelling innovation come in.
Banking The Unbanked
Although banking the unbanked is not a new development, neither is it cliche, yet the latest approach has been intriguing and worth consideration.
To engage the unbanked, to compel them to actively make their transactions through financial institutions, their attributes must be learnt, the data must be gathered in other to create an encouraging pattern amongst the unbanked. this is where the new feature that has been recently launched come in
Tools For The Unbanked
In recent times, some Nigerian fintech has come up with new product services, some of this fintech include MoNo, VerifyMe and many more. These fintechs are offering products that can help with data accessing of the unbanked, without the use of the regular Bank Verification Number (BVN) or the use of the National Identity Number (NIN).
MoNo in its space has launched a telecommunication application programming interface (API) to enable businesses to collate unbanked consumer data having previously received user’s consent
MoNo designed its product to enable businesses and fintechs to use substitute information to drive financial inclusion of prospective consumers making data-based decisions easy. All data acquisition will be sourced through the consumer’s active telco data/history.
In the same vein, VerifyMe has also launched an identity product for unbanked consumers, dubbed QoreID, which is designed to provide varieties of authentication and confirmation tools to link businesses with verified identities and important consumer information thereby representing a substitute scoring instrument majorly designed for unbanked consumers.
Through the platform customers’ needs and wants are discovered after consent is given, thereby providing consumers with services that will meet their needs and want, reducing consumer complaints.
The mentioned startups are only a few out of many developed innovations targeted at banking the unbanked. These are innovations that as much as they are useful, are set on the flame of inquisition, asking about the mind and its ability to think and create mind-blowing innovation.
It is obvious that this is not the end to more new innovations in the fintech ecosystem, more are coming and the audience is ready for it, the ideology-supported disruptive innovation is always welcomed.