Lee Maina, Head of FinTech, Huawei Southern Africa Region has averred that now is the ideal time to expand fintech to a tool used in deepening financial inclusion.
Maina made this assertion during the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications’ 2023 Mobile Technology for Development (MT4D) Conference held at Kempinski Hotel in Accra. The conference was dubbed: ‘Driving Digital Inclusion In The Real Economy‘.
At the event, the Fintech Head said, Huawei is a Global Leader in FinTech Solutions with insight on current trends in Ghana, Kenya and other Sub-Saharan countries, adding that in these countries, inclusion has heavily been driven by mobile money and its reaches out to the unserved and underserved. Maina believes that:
“It’s the ideal time to expand FinTech from being ubiquitous to a tool used in deepening financial inclusion to help drive value for the real economy.”
Lee Maina
According to Mr. Maina, the Mobile FinTech space is transitioning into a new era, where customer data is becoming more critical in the endeavor to authenticate, offer the most suitable services and in carrying out more precise credit assessments.
“This is no longer those ‘nice to have‘ approaches, but a vital cog in retaining and gaining market share in an ever-crowding industry where even new entrants are challenging established incumbents.”
Lee Maina
Additionally, Maina noted that in the race for ownership of the customers’ mind share, it is believed that the winners are the ones with the most valuable, relevant, holistic and authenticated body of data that enables them to offer the most suitable services to customers, at the most suitable time and at user-specific pricing.
“For us to generate this rich data that’s scattered across different sectors, platforms and players, there is the need for concerted efforts from all stakeholders not only in bringing everyone online but also in collapsing our approach to technology from Silo base to layer based, where information is easily shared. Huawei’s FinTech 2.0 seeks to bridge this gap created by fragmentation by bringing this layered approach not just to FinTech Technology, but also to the upselling of ideal services where the personalized proposition for each user deepens based on our understanding of each customer’s habits and needs.
“As a world-leading ICT enterprise, our vision and mission are to bring digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected and intelligent world. With Fintech 2.0, we continue to invest heavily in FinTech research and innovation, supporting players in the FinTech space to create end-to-end solutions that will bring the value chains online, basically seeking to solve some of the persistent problems they may be having beyond payments. That way, we remove any lethargies to adoption by extending their resilience, ultimately generating the required data to extend services, while also driving localized innovation and ensuring efficient deployment of capital and resources.
Lee Maina
Huawei’s finance and payments cloud boosts financial activities in Ghana
For the Ghanaian market, Huawei has deployed its Finance and payments cloud as part of its Fintech 2.0 strategy which boosts acquisition of microloan, buy now pay later, shoppers’ loans, overdrafts, savings, super apps with mini-apps etc., allowing FinTechs in Ghana to enjoy them on SAAS (Software As A Service) mode with minimal investment, while also offering them the flexibility to localize the solutions and utilize the local developer ecosystem for scale & support through a low code/no code developer platform.
Its estimated that Ghana has over 20K developers and the local universities add approximately 1K new developers into the job market annually.
It’s not viable to absorb all these talents in the current job environment nor will all the surplus have an equal stab at entrepreneurship. It is, therefore, prudent to devise a sustainable way to accommodate them into FinTech strategy and ecosystem, Maina said, and they will play a vital role not only in scaling services to the longtail customer segments but also in driving local innovations.
Huawei’s Low code/no code developer solution empowers FinTechs to achieve this vision.
“We have deployed our FinTech in more than 40 sites globally, which is currently serving more than 400 million customers. So it’s not just technology, but our ability to package all these best practice learnings from other successful sites, and bring that success DNA to your project to ensure faster time to revenue.
“Huawei seeks partnerships in Ghana with like-minded organizations to deepen financial inclusion.”
Lee Maina
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