By Emmanuel Elebeke

As part of its drive to deepen financial inclusion of the Central bank of Nigeria, CBN, Merchant and Agent Transactions services Ltd, MATS says it has signed ten landmark agreements and is actively integrating them for agency transactions in Nigeria.

The firm is deploying own proprietary software, point of transaction kiosks and staffed agency network  to serve licensed providers in Nigeria.

The Chief Technology  Officer of the company, Henry David  said the firm is actively aggregating licensed providers of mobile money in Nigeria to enable subscribers  transact from any of the operator platforms, via any of its channel  outlets which is in active roll out nationwide.

The action according to him is in a bid to bridge the gap with the unbanked population in Nigeria, give banked customers more transactional options for entire population to access agency network leveraging on  mobile financial services of the licensed providers in Nigeria,

The firm had successfully signed up and integrated  10  licensed Mobile Money providers in Nigeria, which is expected  to enable  licensed operators lower their operational cost, accelerate roll out and the reach of mobile financial services as well as agency banking.

According to David, MATS had built a next generation aggregated platform that can handle and process subscriber requests from all the licensed partnering financial institutions and mobile money operators to access their agency network for transnational purposes. The agency network which is in active roll out will be combined with own network locations and partner locations in collaboration with  leading distribution networks, and will be manned by trained MATS certified and branded agents nationwide.

Speaking on the  initiative,  the Director for Business Development at  MATS, Emmanuel Okoegwale, said  ‘’We have been working on the project in the last two years and had witnessed the pain points of the licensed providers in terms of agent network churn, acquisition cost and monitoring . We have taken all these into consideration to offer this next gen platform which comes along with the staffed agency network to serve licensed providers in Nigeria to further deepen the financial inclusion aspirations of the Central Bank of Nigeria.

“ We know that Mobile Money is a low-value and high-volume based business and that is why We are partnering with licensed providers to use  our staffed outlets to ensure service quality, reach, transaction volumes and  deepen adoption in furtherance to the financial inclusion aspirations of the Central Bank of Nigeria.”