Moniepoint partners Google Cloud to make financial services more accessible to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Nigeria

A new partnership between Google Cloud and Moniepoint, a business banking platform with an emphasis on Africa that offers financial services to underbanked firms in distant communities and areas of Nigeria, has been launched.

By bridging the banking gap in suburban areas, the alliance makes financial services scalable and accessible to millions of small and medium-sized organizations (SMEs).

In Nigeria, there are more than 41 million microbusinesses, according to Statista. To succeed, these companies must be able to accept payments online. Moniepoint resorted to Google Cloud’s scalable cloud infrastructure as it transitioned into consumer-facing products intended to digitize these enterprises and equip them for success.

Moniepoint benefits from low-latency internet connectivity through Google Cloud’s scalable infrastructure, which enables the company to offer effective financial services to its clients without causing any lag when they use the platform. As a result, Moniepoint is able to successfully make its financial services available in Nigeria’s distant villages and communities where firms operating outside the country’s commercial hubs—where mainstream banking is more accessible—have trouble getting access to the internet.

Additionally, Moniepoint was able to double its customer base and increase it from 300,000 small and medium-sized enterprises at the beginning of 2022 to 1.3 million organizations now as a result of the simplicity of using Google Cloud. To execute financial transactions and accept payments for their services, these firms now rely on Moniepoint’s payments application.

Moniepoint built a hybrid cloud strategy for a portion of its payments application on Cloud Spanner that relies on the scalable infrastructure of Google Cloud, managing an average of 200,000 financial requests per minute. The application, which is designed to manage a planet-size amount of transactions, maintains track of all the requests and financial transactions that Moniepoint processes. Moniepoint is prepared for greater expansion and can scale to handle 300 million transactions per month as the firm expects supporting more than 500 percent of its present activity.

Google Cloud has been a key enabler in fueling Moniepoint’s growth journey from day one, as we expanded from a small business to become a licensed business bank that serves 1.3 million businesses across Nigeria today,” said Felix Ike, Chief Technology Officer of Moniepoint. Because Google Cloud technologies are simple to deploy, our development team is equipped with the most recent technology to handle financial transactions swiftly and respond to requests. We are certain that, as we expand across Africa over the next 18 months, we can serve three million users using the scalable infrastructure provided by Google Cloud.

In order to increase the volume of transactional requests, such as payment transactions and accounting ledgers, the organization additionally uses Google Kubernetes Engine. Moniepoint increased the workload processing capacity from 1,000 to 4,000 requests per minute, allowing the company to respond to consumer requirements swiftly and seamlessly.

Director of Google Cloud Africa, Niral Patel “NIBSS found that 50% of Nigeria’s adult population of 207 million is underbanked. By giving SMEs access to banking services, Moniepoint is a cutting-edge business model designed to promote financial inclusion and have a beneficial impact on people’s quality of life. By utilizing Google Cloud’s affordable cloud solutions, which allowed for the automation of its manual operations, the company has expanded from a small to a large-scale enterprise. With Google Cloud’s architecture, the team at Moniepoint has streamlined transactional operations that would take up to eight hours to complete into 10 minutes. Banking and financial services can be a process-heavy industry. As more companies trust Moniepoint’s smooth and secure services, this has translated into an increase in the number of clients relying on it.