The Darkside of Fintech

A few weeks ago, the market-leading fintech platforms were stopped by the CBN from opening new bank accounts. Now, I’m not entirely sure what the issues were and if these institutions had mobile money licences, or MFB licences… but there was confusion and small small chaos across the board. Chaos that our financial services sector can do without, as we all try and figure out how to bring the underbanked into a digital-first banking system.

What I do know is that these players operate in the financial services sector, they have a licence of some sort and therefore they have fiduciary responsibility. Key to this — no matter what licence the CBN has granted you — is knowing your customers [KYC]. And not just as part of a box ticking exercise so that you can run back to investors with out-of-this-world sign-up [vanity] metrics. If we’re all fintechs, it’s not just about making payments easier and therefore getting people to sign up; tech enabled financial services is much, much more than that.

As a financial services sector, we need to be focussed on safeguarding the processes around financial services — building trust along the way, at every stage. We need to deploy technology and investment into safeguarding the ecosystem — which I do not think is happening. The fintechs are focussed on vanity numbers — X numbers of transactions or X number of users [not always active users… but that’s another…