Financial Inclusion: Google Cloud, Moniepoint Partner To Empower Underbanked Businesses

Google Cloud has partnered with Moniepoint, an Africa-focused business banking platform to provide financial services to Nigeria’s underbanked businesses residing in remote areas and communities.

The collaboration makes financial services accessible at scale to millions of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) by bridging the banking gap in suburban locations, according to a statement by Google Cloud.

“By leveraging Google Cloud’s scalable infrastructure, Moniepoint is able to process $14 billion worth of financial transactions on a monthly basis, providing secure and low latency banking services to SMEs in remote areas and communities.

It said data from Statista show that there are over 41 million micro-businesses in Nigeria. “Enabling these businesses to accept payments digitally is crucial to their success.”

According to the company, its scalable infrastructure provides Moniepoint with low-latency internet access that helps the company deliver efficient banking services to its customers without them encountering any lag when using the platform.

“This in turn enables Moniepoint to succeed in making its banking services accessible to Nigeria’s remote towns and communities where access to internet connectivity poses challenges to businesses that operate outside Nigeria’s commercial hubs—where mainstream banking is more accessible,” it added.

Felix Ike, chief Technology officer at Moniepoint, said Google Cloud has been a key enabler in fueling its growth journey from day one, as we expanded from a small business to become a licensed business bank that caters to 1.3 million businesses across the country today.

“Our development team is empowered with the latest technology to process financial transactions quickly and move fast with requests as Google Cloud technologies are easy to deploy.

“With Google Cloud’s scalable infrastructure we are confident that we can grow our customer base exponentially to cater to three million customers in the coming 18 months as we expand our footprint across Africa,’ he said.

Nigeria’s Inter-Bank Settlement System revealed that 50 percent of Nigeria’s 207 million adult populations are currently underbanked, Niral Patel, director at Google Cloud Africa added.

“Banking and financial services can be a process-heavy domain, but with Google Cloud’s infrastructure, the team at Moniepoint has automated transactional processes that would take up to eight hours into 10 minutes,” he said.

He said this has translated into growing the volume of customers relying on Moniepoint, as more businesses become confident in its seamless and secure services.