Google Cloud has announced a new collaboration with Nigerian fintech Moniepoint to drive financial inclusion in Africa’s biggest economy.
The company said the collaboration makes financial services accessible at scale to millions of small and medium-sized enterprises by bridging the banking gap in suburban locations.
Google and Moniepoint are targeting over 41 million micro-businesses in Nigeria, as they seek to enable these businesses to accept payments digitally.
“As Moniepoint pivoted into consumer-facing products designed to digitise these businesses and gear them to success, the company turned to Google Cloud’s scalable cloud infrastructure to help achieve this mission”, reads the statement from Google.
It adds: “Google Cloud’s 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.”
According to Google, this enables Moniepoint to succeed in making its banking services accessible to remote towns and communities where internet connectivity poses challenges.
Through this partnership, Google says Moniepoint increased customer base from 300,000 small and medium-sized businesses at the start of 2022, to 1.3 million today.
The fintech also leverages Google Kubernetes Engine to scale the volume of transactional requests processed, such as payment transactions and accounting ledgers.
Chief Technology Officer, Felix Ike, Moniepoint, said: “Google Cloud has been a key enabler in fueling Moniepoint’s 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 Nigeria 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.”
Director of Google Cloud Africa, Niral Patel, said: “Nigeria’s Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) revealed that 50 per cent of Nigeria’s 207 million adult population is currently underbanked. Moniepoint is a unique business model established to drive financial inclusion and positively impact the livelihood of people by providing SMEs with access to banking services.
“The company has successfully grown from a small to a large-scale business by capitalizing on Google Cloud’s cost-effective cloud solutions that have enabled the automation of its manual processes.
“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.
“This has translated into growing the volume of customers relying on Moniepoint, as more businesses become confident in its seamless and secure services.”
