Moniepoint, one of Nigeria’s biggest business banks, is moving into personal banking with the launch of a consumer app and debit card.
Moniepoint, a Nigerian fintech that provides banking services to businesses, is now venturing into the retail banking space. A retail banking focus will put it in competition with OPay and PalmPay. With a new app, users will be able to make transfers, pay bills, and buy airtime, while its debit cards, issued through Mastercard and Verve, can be used at ATMs, POS terminals, and online.
The company also says it will introduce a first-of-its-kind automated dispute resolution system that will enable users to log disputes for failed card transactions and track them until they get a full reversal within 48 hours. This is in line with the CBN’s guidelines on chargebacks, which mandate a 48-hour reversal period.
Ope Adeyemi, Moniepoint’s senior vice president for channels and sales tools, told TechCabal that the fintech saw an opportunity to make things better. “We currently have 800,000 terminals actively used daily across the country, and assuming there are 120 million adults in Nigeria, the ratio is 150:1. We can leverage this to make payments and banking better.”
Adeyemi also added that with Moniepoint’s banking app, the company would be able to bring reliability to payments. “We still have to rely on other banks to complete payments, but the idea here is to improve the reliability of making payments and banking by ensuring that the process of making payments starts with the customer on Moniepoint and ends with the merchants on Moniepoint as well; that way we can literally almost guarantee 100% success rates,” he said.
For an 8-year-old payments company, Moniepoint could have launched a personal banking product earlier, but Adeyemi shared that the company chose now because “[Moniepoint] are positioned to do it right.” He added that the company had designed its personal banking app to be as reliable as possible and added features such as salary advances. The app would also contain all the sensitive information on a customer’s debit card instead of being on the card. Adeyemi also added that a play at remittances would come later for both its business customers and its personal bank customers.
