The Acting Managing Director, Moniepoint Microfinance, Babatunde Olofin, said access to finance shouldn’t be a privilege in Nigeria, as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) falls behind its financial inclusion target.
CBN has a target of 95 per cent rate of financial inclusion by 2024, however, with four months left in 2023, the financial regulator has only achieved 64.1 per cent.
According to the Assistant Director, of Financial Development, of CBN, Paul Oluikpe, in July, the current figure is not where the apex bank wants to be.
With more Nigerians or communities still undeserved financial or unbanked, Olofin at a recently held financial inclusion conference said there’s a need to extend access to financial opportunities and tools to individuals in the informal sectors.
To improve financial inclusion in the country, Olofin noted that okada riders and market women should be targeted, reason why Moniepoint is extending its personal banking segment to the informal market traders.
He cited the role of technology in capturing small and medium-sized businesses into the financial system, as Moniepoint alone has added 1.6 million Nigerian ventures.
“We have powered the dreams of a lot of business owners, and we know what individuals need. We want to include everyone from the regular Okada rider, the market woman in the financial services space.
“We have built our infrastructure in such a way that it is a very elastic. As transactions grow, we are able to expand our infrastructure and this is because we have several monitoring tools that help us to monitor how transactions are growing.”
He affirmed that financial inclusion should be the right of every Nigerians, even in the nooks and crannies of the country, where majority have to depend on financial technology companies like Moniepoint in the absence of physical banking and Auto Teller Machines (ATM).
