A new partnership between Google Cloud and Moniepoint, an African-focused business banking platform that offers financial services to Nigeria’s underbanked businesses residing in outlying communities, was announced today. By bridging the banking gap in suburban areas, the collaboration makes financial services scalable and accessible to millions of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
In Nigeria, there are more than 41 million microbusinesses, according to Statista. To succeed, these companies must be able to accept payments online. Moniepoint turned to Google Cloud’s scalable cloud infrastructure as it transitioned into consumer-facing products intended to digitize these businesses and equip them for success.
Moniepoint benefits from low-latency internet access from Google Cloud’s scalable infrastructure, which enables the company to offer effective banking services to its clients without causing any lag when they use the platform. As a result, Moniepoint is able to successfully make its banking services available in Nigeria’s remote towns and communities where businesses operating outside the country’s commercial hubs—where mainstream banking is more accessible—have trouble getting access to the internet.
Additionally, Moniepoint was able to double its customer base and increase it from 300,000 small and medium-sized businesses at the beginning of 2022 to 1.3 million businesses today as a result of the simplicity of using Google Cloud. To process financial transactions and accept payments for their services, these businesses now rely on Moniepoint’s payments application.
Moniepoint established a portion of its payments application on Cloud Spanner, which depends on the scalable infrastructure of Google Cloud, as part of a hybrid cloud strategy, and now manages an average of 200,000 financial requests per minute. The application, which is designed to handle planet-size volumes of transactions, keeps track of all the requests and financial transactions that Moniepoint processes. With Moniepoint poised for greater growth, the application is ready to scale to handle 300 million transactions each month as the company anticipates supporting more than 500% of its current workload.
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
In order to scale the volume of transactional requests, such as payment transactions and accounting ledgers, the company also uses Google Kubernetes Engine. Moniepoint increased the workload processing capacity from 1,000 to 4,000 requests per minute, allowing the company to respond to customer requests swiftly and seamlessly.
Niral Patel, Director of 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 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.“
