Financial experts have said that digital technologies offer financial services at lower costs, fostering opportunities for large-scale inclusion by enabling institutions to serve lower-income customers and create employment.
They made the assertion during the two-day conference organised by the Scale2save – World Savings and Retail Banking Institute (WSBI) in partnership with MasterCard Foundation on Thursday in Lagos.
The conference had as its theme “Inclusive financial services for women, youths and farmers to fuel the Nigeria recovery’’.
Scale2save is WSBI’s current programme on financial inclusion working in six African countries: Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Morocco, Uganda and Senegal, with the support of Enhancing Financial Innovation and Access (EFInA).
Scale2save is about scaling-up the use of savings accounts and other basic financial services by banking people for the first time.
It aims to empower low-income people to make the most of their resources and open the path to a more prosperous and dignified life.
Programme director Scale2save Weselina Angelow said that the best way to encourage low-income people to embrace resilient savings was to use technologies to meet their basic savings needs.
She gave examples with digital payment of electricity bills, emergency health bills and rent payments.
She said that meeting those basic savings needs with innovations would naturally build-up their resilience saving attitude.
Chief Executive Officer (CEO), EFInA, Ashley Immanuel, said that there was need to embrace digital financial services to promote financial inclusion in Nigeria.
She said digital models such as mobile money had the potential to enable women to achieve empowerment and secure a pathway out of poverty.
“If digital financial services are used to its full capacity, it could grow the GDP by 12 per cent,” she said.
Titilola Shogaolu, CEO, Interswitch Financial Inclusion Services Limited, said that innovation was key in achieving financial inclusion for underserved and unserved populations in the present era where cash out was predominant with banking agent centres.
She said there was a need for innovations like biometrics, USSD and pay codes to close the gap created by card based cash out for unbanked people.
Shogaolu said that the proliferation of Fintech had the advantage of simplifying the Know-Your-Customer (KYC) process in the financial industry.
Also speaking, Dotun Ifebogun, Divisional Head, Retail Banking, Wema Bank, said that innovation had the capability to solve identification problems that bank customers always encountered while opening accounts.
Ifebogun said that every customer left digital identity footprints while registering their phone numbers, working on the internet or opening accounts on social media.
He said that the data collated from all the past digital footprints could be used to open an account instead of insisting on an identity card.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the session also looked at the challenges and opportunities in offering digital technologies to women, and the role of digital platforms in driving employment.
