Denis Opudo
TechInAfrica – Research has proven that there are a large number of Africans who are still unbanked up to date. This has made it hard for such group of people to acquire loans from banks of various financial institutions. This has hindered their growth due to the shortage of financial support. This is not a different case in Nigeria where 61% of the adult population remains unbanked. Thanks to various fintech startups such as Paylater that have come up to help narrow the wide financial gap that has been there.
Such companies have offered a great opportunity for consumers to access formal banking services. Moreover, Paylater has enabled Nigerian consumers to access the much-required funding for personal development, emergency expenses or entrepreneurial investments. Nigeria lacks consumer credit. However, the fintech company is giving loans to Nigerians digitally without the need of seeing them practically. Clients are in a position to get the funds in their account in not more than 5 minutes. Additionally, there is no need for paperwork, guarantors or collateral during the whole transaction.
Digital financial services have had a good reception from consumers. This has been proven by the numbers of fintech companies in Nigeria. The country has more than 800,000 registered users in every state in Nigeria. In 2018 alone, Paylater has issued loans to more than $17 million to Nigerian consumers. The platform has quickly gone ahead to supplement its loans with PayVest an investment feature and bill payment feature.
According to the CEO and co-founder of the platform Chijioke Dozie, they were overwhelmed by the customer’s adoption of the platform. He added that the market still offers them a great opportunity for significant growth for digital financial services. Commercial banks that used to offer financial services to their customers lost their customer’s trust by taking deposits from their average customers and reserved the real banking services such as investments and loans specifically for high net worth people and large corporates. Many modern economies are nowadays built on credit making it an important aspect of human development. Paylater has recorded not less than 1 million downloads since its launch into the Nigerian markets.
