Google Cloud has announced a new partnership with Moniepoint, a business banking platform focused on serving underbanked businesses in remote areas of Nigeria. The collaboration aims to provide accessible financial services to millions of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by addressing the banking gap in suburban locations.
With over 41 million micro-businesses in Nigeria, enabling digital payments for these businesses is crucial. Moniepoint has shifted its focus towards consumer-facing products that digitize these businesses and support their growth. To achieve this, the company has turned to Google Cloud’s scalable cloud infrastructure.
Google Cloud’s infrastructure offers low-latency internet access, ensuring efficient banking services without any delays. This enables Moniepoint to extend its banking services to Nigeria’s remote towns and communities, where access to internet connectivity can be challenging. By leveraging Google Cloud’s user-friendly environment, Moniepoint has successfully expanded its customer base from 300,000 small and medium-sized businesses in early 2022 to 1.3 million businesses today.
Moniepoint manages approximately 200,000 financial requests per minute, and it has implemented a hybrid cloud strategy utilizing Google Cloud’s scalable infrastructure through Cloud Spanner. This ensures the secure storage and processing of financial transactions. The system is designed to handle a substantial volume of transactions and can scale to process up to 300 million transactions per month as Moniepoint anticipates significant growth.
The collaboration between Google Cloud and Moniepoint empowers underbanked businesses in Nigeria, allowing them to access digital financial services and facilitating their success in remote areas.
Felix Ike, Chief Technology Officer, 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.”
The company also leverages Google Kubernetes Engine to scale the volume of transactional requests that are processed such as payment transactions and accounting ledgers. Moniepoint boosted the volume of requests processed per workload from 1,000 to 4,000 requests per minute, enabling the business to turn around customer requests very quickly and seamlessly.
Niral Patel, Director, Google Cloud Africa, added: “Nigeria’s Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) revealed that 50 percent 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.”
