Mobile Money And FinTech Solutions were the topics discussed at the Panel Sessions of Inlaks Nigeria’s Digital Summit
The 1st Panel session was titled “Mobile money in West Africa”
The moderator noted that collaboration is key to achieving financial inclusion and collaboration is needed between banks, SMEs, Fintech start-ups and agents
Mr. Maxwell Opoku-Afari, Representative of the deputy governor of the bank of Ghana, gave a case study of how mobile money became efficient in Ghana. By it being Bank-led, the use of the many-to-many model, mandatory interoperability, and also banks own and manage agents. The mobile phone is one of the wonderful technologies that happened to Africa and with it, mobile financial services have made banking easy. Why the appeal of mobile money in West Africa? Reasons are because of the limited brick and mortar banking services, high financial exclusion, high mobile phone coverage, and penetration rate and for convenience and flexibility. Some of the challenges they faced were under investments, risk of the free-riding cause of the many to many models, misalignment of investment and incentives, and lack of traction.
The Lessons learned from this experience are: Regulators must be prepared to learn through dialogue, there will be evolving of new regulations, must promote collaboration among stakeholders, and banking and mobile money are not competitors. You can’t have mobile money without having a bank and right now, you can’t have banking without having mobile money because they complement each other and with both of them in play customers can have a choice of which they will use.
Fintechs needs to be promoted and brought to the limelight. Also, interoperability is essential to promoting efficiency, and there is a need to balance data protection and effective use of data to promote risk-based standards. He concluded that Mobile money holds significance prospects for digitizing banking and promoting financial inclusion and so regulations have to evolve to support this development.
The 2nd Panel session was titled “Fintech Solution to Enhance Customer Experience”.
The Panelists agreed that People do not need banks that they need banking services and that in the next 20 to 30 years, Fintech will take over the banking section.
Abubakar Sule, MD, Sterling Bank added that Customers are redefining their expectations, taking their cues from industries that offer multichannel access and also demand product simplicity and that the global Fintech market size in 2018 reached 111.8billion dollars.
Mobile money is innovative and has been made available and easy for customers. Mobile money is fast becoming a new trend for many users in the financial sector because it fastens banking activities and more customers welcome the innovation.
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