Making Financial Services Available To West Africa’s Underserved Communities

Words and Curation: Oluwatomisin Amokeoja
Additional Reporting: Chanel Retief and Nicole Pillay
Art Director: Manelisi Dabata

“We set out to make world-class financial services available to everyday consumers and businesses so that a student in Benin, a market trader in Kano or a salary earner in Lagos could all transact, save and grow their businesses with the same ease as someone in London.”  

In the palm of one’s hands–that’s how easy accessing money should be. However, that is not always the case. It is also why, for this fintech, the mission was clear from the very beginning.  

“Before we launched, if you knew the Nigerian terrain well, you’d understand that more than half of adults were unbanked, and cash dominated everyday commerce,” Chika Nwosu says.  

He adds that even those with bank accounts, cards, or those transacting through banks still often preferred to use cash—largely because of service issues and high failure rates. At the time of PalmPay’s inception, for example, failure rates were as high as 20%. Sometimes, upon making a transfer, Nwosu says money would hang and if people needed to use POS systems, they would encounter one problem after another.  

“When you went to the bank to resolve it, the experience was often frustrating. That was one of the major reasons we started,” he tells FORBES AFRICA.  

“We set out to make world-class financial services available to everyday consumers and businesses so that a student in Benin, a market trader in Kano or a salary earner in Lagos could all transact, save and grow their businesses with the same ease as someone in London.”  

PalmPay focuses on three areas: distribution, network reliability, and affordability; this is to ensure that they enable cost-effective and wide-reaching distribution by reaching underserved populations. Nwosu says this was developed via their smartphone-based banking app and built on a nationwide network of over a million mobile money agents and merchants. 

“We operate in all 774 local government areas in Nigeria. We’ve made it a priority to reach even the most rural areas. When it comes to reliability, we have a transaction success rate of over 99.9% on the platform,” he says.  

“And, in terms of affordability, we offer free transfers. Many banks charge around 53 naira ($0.03) or even up to 100 naira ($0.06) as a surcharge—but with us, it’s completely free.”  

For PalmPay, their philosophy is a simple one: tackle financial inclusion. “We are doing in Nigeria to ensure that we provide the best financial services to our users.”