A financial technology firm, Tingo Mobile Plc, has emphasised the importance of easy cash access to Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) for economic development.
According to the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS), SMEs have contributed about 48 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the last five years.
SMEs are about 17.4 million and account for about 50 per cent of industrial jobs and nearly 90 per cent of the manufacturing sector, in terms of number.
Speaking yesterday in Lagos during the unveiling of Tingo Pay Super App, its Chief Operating Officer, Alao Ayoade, said the platform, a financial solution app, was designed to tackle the challenges SMEs and bank customers with smartphones faced. He said the app will tackle the challenge of limited payment options for users.
Ayoade said the new solution will address the challenge of inability to resolve transaction issues on time with banks, provide business continuity due to funds, provide multiple solutions to perform their transactions, address issues relating to complexity with adoption of application and create business continuity for Agent as the T+1 time on settlement from Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) can be challenging.
According to him, while CBN started its cashless policy in 2007, the policy has seen a lot of improvement with implementation in various sectors and SMEs springing up and channelling their businesses at facilitating adoption of the policy.
Ayoade said the CBN’s directive last year to Money Deposit Banks (DMBs) to implement higher charges on cash transactions saw organisations and tech savvy taking advantage by developing solutions to address the adoption and provide solutions to users of notes.
“Bank customers enjoyed a 43 per cent increase in consumer loans in two years, as banks and fintechs intensified competition for the lucrative retail lending space through digital lending services. To further enable loan companies, CBN has enabled DMBs to direct debit customers irrespective of where they have funds which will reduce the risk on loan companies,” Ayoade said.
On one hand, he said the new Tingo Pay will allow end-user purchase airtime as well as data for the four major network providers in the country (MTN, AIRTEL, GLO and 9Mobile) as well as Smile and Spectranet.
Television subscription within the country for Startime and Multichoice would also be allowed on the platform as well as generation of tokens for users from electricity providers in Nigeria. Other services would include result checker on WAEC and one way messaging setup for One Time Password (OTP).
On the other hand, the platform will allow an easy way for SME to generate online invoices for customers with various payment methods. It will also grant “Checkout”; an inline integration for Web applications and CMS to complete payment on their sites. It also has provision for fund transfer option within the Payant application and also transfer application programming interface (API) to process fund transfer from external applications while providing a dashboard for well detailed reporting system to report inflow, outflow, invoicing and monitor all traffic of users
Tingo Pay is also expected to provide agency banking, where the solution will provide PoS terminals for agents to perform cashIn/cashout transactions. Ayoade said the new solution will also provide soft loans to customers with ease of access and repayment.