Jaime Pinto is Chief Commercial Officer for Africa at Software Group. He is experienced in Payments/Financial solutions, Digital and Mobile solutions, Banking and Telecom industries. His entrepreneurial mindset has brought him to dive deeper and gain expertise in Products, Services & Innovative Solutions Design, Development, Marketing, Sales & Deployment. He spoke to Chike Onwuegbuchi on how Software Group is contributing to deepening Financial Inclusion in Nigeria
How your Solutions Enhance Financial Inclusion for the Unbanked
Our company’s vision is to accelerate financial inclusion by delivering cutting-edge solutions. So, financial inclusion is part of our DNA and since the beginning, we have been working with micro-financial institutions that serve the rural areas where access to financial services is scarce, enabling fast and intuitive mobile customer onboarding and loan origination even in the most remote places.
One of our award-winning solutions, supporting financial inclusion, is Agency Banking which enables banks and other financial service providers to expand their footprint and offer in-person banking to customers without investing in physical branches.
Mobile wallet is another solution which enables banks or other FSPs to create a new channel for everyday banking and offer fast, secure and affordable digital payments, especially for people with no regular access to bank branches. It could be implemented in a context of a bank, national post office or a telco company with the potential to evolve into a supper app including a variety of third-party services such as insurance, travel tickets, digital loans, etc.
We also have a USSD platform that is part of the ecosystem for those without smartphones or data services.
How your Solutions can Check-mate Fraud
Our Agency Banking solution supports industry-leading security standards. All agent transactions are authorized either with OTP, Fingerprint Biometric, Card PIN, or customer-initiated methods. This reduces fraud and ensures financial institutions know who their customer is, even for customers with no formal IDs. In addition, advanced agent analytics dashboards and predictive models help the financial institution spot suspicious activity and fraudulent transactions early on by monitoring the agent network.
Uniqueness of your Solutions in the Ecosystem
Our Agency Banking solution has won multiple awards, has been recognized by industry analysts and has been successfully deployed in over 20 countries. It is the most advanced and robust agency banking platform with all the best practice capabilities needed to develop and maintain a high-performing agent network.
Similar to what is available in the market, our Agency Banking solution enables FSPs to scale their points of service without investing in costly branch and ATM networks. However, our solution is not only for cash in cash-out, and bill payment.
Agents can securely onboard customers, transact, cross-sell, and provide value-add services on behalf of the FSP. As it’s built on DigiWave, our Digital Banking platform, our clients can go to market quickly with other digital channels, like Mobile Wallet. Further, we offer different deployment models depending on the client's needs and budget.
Challenges and Opportunities in the Market
We have studied the Nigerian market, which is highly competitive and price sensitive. In addition, some of the challenges experienced are frequent system down times, heavy reliance on legacy systems, and the ever-changing regulatory environment that requires FSP to invest in solutions that drive financial inclusion.
We see these challenges as opportunities, and our solutions take this into account, which is why we offer different models that work for every player in the ecosystem.
For instance, we have an excellent Agency Banking as a managed service that will transform this market. Off-the-shelf and fully managed in the cloud, this platform is highly flexible and scalable and enables financial institutions to quickly onboard it. We are partners with our clients, and their success is also our success so we made sure we offer them a great platform to do business which can be deployed at optimal cost.
Some institutions do not want to take risks and will ask which other big bank is using your solution before they can accept to deploy. My answer to them would be to go for something better than their competitors are using and choose proven technology which allows fast time to market and scalability.
Software Group’s key differentiator is the fact that our solutions are all built on the robust DigiWave Digital Banking Platform, which has a modular architecture and allows banks to innovate quickly and introduce new solutions, while still utilising their legacy system.
About Software Group
Software Group is a global technology company that helps financial service providers such as Banks, Insurance Companies, MFIs, governments, postal offices, central banks, etc successfully go through the process of digital transformation, extend their outreach and improve operational efficiency. Ultimately helping and strengthening financial inclusion in the continent.
Our solutions are built on a single platform to enable quick launch to market, easy scaling, and integration to all channels. They include Agency Banking, Mobile Wallet, Mobile and Internet Banking, Digital Insurance, Digital Onboarding and Loan Origination among others.
We operate from 9 regional offices across the world, with over 200 customers served to date. Our Africa HQ is based in Kenya and we also have offices in Ghana and Nigeria.
We have clients in Nigeria that have taken up our Agency Banking solution, and we are proud that our solutions are very relevant in the financial inclusion initiative.
Very soon, we will be announcing a go-live with some big institutions to support financial inclusion in the Nigerian market that will target not just those serving the cities, but also those serving the rural areas. It is really about financial inclusion.
