..As Interswitch PaaS promises to empower MFBs

By Prince Osuagwu

In the last five years, Nigeria’s vast SME sector has contributed an average of 48% to national GDP

The sector also accounts for about 50 per cent of industrial jobs and almost 90 per cent of activities in the manufacturing sector.

Considering that the SMEs are in the informal sector, majority of the people directly catered for by the SMEs are the fastest growing emerging middle classes.

However, even with Nigeria envious population of approximately 220 million, it worries that almost 40 per cent of the population remains financially excluded.

It means that this lot may not have access to electronic payment systems that leverages businesses and help them increase contribution to the economy.

Taking a bold step, Payment solutions provider, Interswitch has risen stoutly to provide a bail out. It began with empowering the MicroFinance Banks, MFBs which mostly serve as the preferred bank to the businesses in the informal sector.

The company has launched mobile banking solutions Mobile banking as a service, MbaaS and Payment as a service, PaaS which will strategically bring every financially excluded person into the loop.

The banking solutions are payment platforms that will allow financial institution and Fintechs extend payments services to their customers. They also enable financial institutions perform the usual cards issuance, process transactions, access to collections and disbursement platforms.

PAAS will allow financial institutions to rapidly integrate to newer payment channels, even as it avails medium and small-sized microfinance banks to offer digital financial services to their numerous customers.

MBAS service has a plug and play approach. Customers of MFBs will be able to download it from the app store and run with the services.

The uniqueness of the solution is such that the app includes major banking features to cater to every client’s need such as money transfers, mobile top ups, bills payment, self service requests, card services among others

MFBs on the jumbo-app will be sharing a single software and a single database  that can easily integrate the financially excluded.

Besides PAAS, Interswitch also provided Security to the solution with Interswitch Security  As A Solution, ISAAS.

In recent times, reported cases of electronic fraud have been on the rise. Interswitch said this also called for urgent attention as stakeholders are urging financial service providers to design a product that will help mitigate and curb fraud to the barest minimum.

To that end, it proactively launched ISaaS to help fight fraud and financial crimes in the financial sector. ISaaS helps to protect customers against payments fraud tendencies.

Specifically, it protect customers against card fraud, application fraud, payment fraud, merchant acquiring fraud and money laundering among others.

These are among the solutions Interswitch promised to roll out during its recently held Techconnect 2.0 event in Lagos.

They help to cut down investment costs for financial institutions, providing a robust product offering through cloud-based platforms to enrich payment experiences of customers, with safety at its core.

But, should the MFBs hook extensively onto the Payment as a Service solution, there would not only be the opportunity for banks and players in the payments ecosystem to focus on specialized services, leaving Interswitch to handle the back-end payment processes, the Nigerian economy will receive a major boost following the huge contribution that may come from the SME sector as more financially excluded people are drawn into the loop.