Moniepoint, Google Cloud partner for suburban access to financial services

By Alexander Chiejina

Moniepoint, the banking platform with a major focus on Africa and offering financial services to Nigeria’s underbanked population residing in outlying areas and communities, and Google Cloud, have entered into a partnership that seeks to close the banking gap in suburban areas, enabling millions of small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) to access financial services on a large scale.

Over 41 million microbusinesses operate in Nigeria, according to Statista. For these companies to succeed, they must be able to accept payments online. To leverage this opportunity, Moniepoint has shifted its focus to consumer-facing solutions intended to digitise small enterprises and position them for success.

Moniepoint benefits from low-latency internet connectivity through Google Cloud’s scalable infrastructure, which enables the company to offer effective financial services to its clients without causing any lag when they use the platform. As a result, Moniepoint can successfully make its financial services available in Nigeria’s distant villages and communities where firms 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 enterprises at the beginning of 2022 to 1.3 million organisations currently on the back of the simplicity of Google Cloud. To execute financial transactions and accept payments for their services, these firms now rely on Moniepoint’s payments application.

Moniepoint created a portion of its payment’s application on Cloud Spanner, which depends on the scalable infrastructure of Google Cloud, as part of a hybrid cloud approach, and now manages an average of 200,000 financial requests per minute. The application, which is designed to manage a planet-size number of transactions, maintains track of all the requests and financial transactions that Moniepoint processes.

“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 serves 1.3 million businesses across Nigeria today,” said Felix Ike, chief technology officer of Moniepoint. 

Continuing, Ike said: “Because Google Cloud technologies are simple to deploy, our development team is equipped with the most recent technology to handle financial transactions swiftly and respond to requests. We are certain that, as we expand across Africa over the next 18 months, we can serve three million users using the scalable infrastructure provided by Google Cloud.”

In order to increase the volume of transactional requests, such as payment transactions and accounting ledgers, the organisation explained that it additionally 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 consumer requirements swiftly and seamlessly.

“According to Nigeria’s Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), 50% of the country’s 207 million adult citizens are now unbanked. Moniepoint is a cutting-edge business strategy created to improve people’s quality of life by giving SMEs access to banking services. By utilising Google Cloud’s cost-effective cloud technologies, which enabled the automation of its manual operations, the company has effectively expanded from a small to a large-scale enterprise. With Google Cloud’s architecture, the team at Moniepoint has streamlined transactional operations that would take up to eight hours to complete into 10 minutes. Banking and financial services can be a process-heavy industry. As more companies trust Moniepoint’s smooth and secure services, this has translated into an increase in the number of clients relying on it,” they explained.