As a third generation and last mile FinTech Company, 2018 was an interesting and affirmative year for us at Innovectives. We reflected on our journey in this recent past year and feel we should share our experience and learning with you.
2018 was the year we travelled far and wide to many of the rural and semi-rural communities in our country where more than half of our population still reside, in order to better understand the distinct peculiarities affecting consumption of organized financial services.
On these trips we came face to face with the gaping needs and how they have crippled the micro economy. We identified the lack of fit-for-purpose and sustainable initiatives to stimulate the demand side of digital financial services. The disproportionately higher number of financially excluded, economically active adults and non-existent access to credit to the productive segment of our society, were indicators that we had to raise our game.
These gaps are not new but the scale and impact on the micro economy calls for intentional and systematic interventions.
Back home, within the organization, 2018 was the year we were able to affirm the agility of our integrated and aggregative strategy for agency banking business through our participation in the Shared Agent Network Expansion Facility (SANEF), a project powered by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the Bankers Committee and NIBSS.
We opted to build an integrated shared agent banking platform that is Financial Institution agnostic because we believe a financial super highway would serve the interest of the customers and service the people better.
In 2018, we wereable to increase the number of FIs and NFIs connected toKesh Express, our agency banking platform, from four to seventeen. Today, Kesh Express is connected to Zenith, GTBank, Access Bank, Stanbic IBTC, UBA, Ecobank and Cowries Microfinance Bank. Wema, Sterling and Jaiz Banks will be live in two weeks. We also connected to NIPOST IFS, Angaza, Masterpass, mVisa, Quickteller, NIBSS and Remita platforms.
Our target for 2019 is to achieve 100% connection to all retail-focused deposit money banks, major micro-finance banks and international remittance platforms.
Yes! Remittance platforms…. We want our agents to be able to pay out Western Union and MoneyGram money transfers from their shops in 2019.
We have been able to recruit over 25,000 agents across the 36 states, out of which over 10,000 agents are connected and actively carrying out financial transactions for customers on our platform. Our plan for 2019 is to speed up agent’s onboarding process and therefore increase the number of activated agents from 10,000 to 50,000.
Amongst several other services, our agents have been able to open over 750,000 bank accounts for various banks connected to our aggregated, integrated and shared Kesh Express agent platform.
Our minimum target in 2019 is for our agents to open over 5 million accounts for our bank partners and recruit over 50,000 new merchants.
To address the challenges of inadequate floats, we commenced a micro-credit scheme for our agents in Q4 of 2018. We have supported our agents with over N30, 000,000 and recorded zero default. Our plan in 2019 is to support our agents with N1.5 billion flexible interest loans.
Last year, we recorded over 1.2 million transactions and were able to drive transactions worth over N800, 000,000 on our agency banking platform. Our target for 2019 is to record 10 million transactions worth N10 billion.
At the end of 2019 we believe we will have many more insights to share as we drive the mission to the next level. I encourage you to stay with us on what promises to be an exciting journey. Please keep an eye on our blog for new quarterly updates.
Agha, Is Innovectives’ Chief Executive
