Niyi Toluwalope, the chief executive officer of eTranzact International Limited, a leading financial technology company, has emphasized the need for Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem to prioritise inclusive growth.
Speaking at the Nigerian FinTech conference, themed ‘positioning Africa’s fintech ecosystem to accelerate inclusive growth,’ he noted that while FinTech has seen significant investment and growth, it must expand beyond traditional areas like e-payments and e-commerce.
“A lot of time, everyone is always talking about growth, growth, and growth. But in FinTech, I think we see a lot more expansion and moving into different areas. The area we need to focus more on is actual growth. Growth from the perspective of deepening into what we are already doing to actually accommodate a lot more players, more people, and more verticals into what we are doing today,” Toluwalope said.
Nigeria’s fintech sector has received over $4 billion in inward investments in the last couple of years. But those monies are focused on e-payments, e-commerce, payment enabling, and all of that.
A report in 2012 emphasised the fact that 90 percent of transactions in Africa are still predominantly cash. If we look at the landscape of Nigeria, there is a lot of fintech activity, but predominantly in Abuja, and recently some of which we have actually taken to Kano and Kaduna.
This tells us there’s still a lot of regions in Africa, in Nigeria, that need to be covered.
The CEO stressed that FinTech must focus on deepening its reach, accommodating more players, and exploring new verticals to truly drive inclusive growth.
“We need to continue to broaden our focus. It’s easy to focus on heavily active hubs in Lagos, the FinTech powerhouse, but we need to ask ourselves, are we spreading the benefits across Nigeria? You might say the returns on investments are there. But it’s not always about return on investments today because we have to think about return on investments tomorrow.
“We need to do what we need to do today, so that in 20 years from now, some of you can be here talking about what you have created over the 20 years, or what you have enabled over the last 20 years to get Nigeria to where it is now and where it ought to be,” the eTranzact CEO said.
“Sectors such as agriculture, healthcare, and real estate offer exciting opportunities for FinTech innovation. However, these areas have been largely overlooked in favour of more established markets. These sectors are also established to be very critical to our economy, yet still not as focused on as they ought to be. The perception is usually they are not investable, but if we aim for true, inclusive growth, FinTech needs to provide solutions that solve the problems in those sectors.”
The CEO charges everyone to be open and to continue to collaborate and be flexible in how we build our FinTech products.
Toluwalope highlighted the significant gap between Nigeria’s banking and unbanked populations, citing 140 million telephone subscribers and only 65 million active bank account holders.
“This is the opportunity in the marketplace,” he noted. “This is what gets us excited every day, and eTranzact has positioned itself as a “super fintech,” ready to collaborate and take on innovative ideas to ensure financial inclusion for all Nigerians.
