Yet another collaboration aimed at the underbanked is claiming strong expectations of growth, this time in Nigeria where Google Cloud and banking platform Moniepoint are working together.
Moniepoint is an Africa-focused business banking platform that provides financial services toNigeria's underbanked businesses residing in remote areas and communities.
The partners say the collaboration makes financial services accessible at scale to millions of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) by bridging the banking gap in suburban locations.
Citing Statista, the partners point out that there are over 41 million micro-businesses inNigeria. Enabling these businesses to accept payments digitally is crucial to their success.
Google Cloud's scalable infrastructure provides Moniepoint with low-latency internet access that helps the company deliver efficient banking services to its customers without their encountering any lag when using the platform. This in turn enables Moniepoint to make its banking services accessible toNigeria'sremote towns and communities where access to internet connectivity poses challenges to businesses.
Moniepoint says that, as a result of Google Cloud's ease of use, it has been able to grow its customer base from 300,000 small and medium-sized businesses at the start of 2022 to 1.3 million businesses today. These businesses now rely on Moniepoint's payments application to process financial transactions and accept payments for their services.
Managing an average of 200,000 financial requests per minute, Moniepoint has established a hybrid cloud strategy for part of its payments application on Cloud Spanner that relies on Google Cloud's scalable infrastructure. The application keeps a record of all the financial transactions and requests that are processed by Moniepoint. With Moniepoint poised for bigger growth—as the company anticipates supporting more than 500% of its current workload—the application is ready to scale to process 300 million transactions.
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 has 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 quickly and seamlessly.