Rinchi
TechInAfrica – The Enhancing Financial Innovation & Access (EFInA) is the UK’s financial conference services. The event held a few days ago with the theme: Powering Financial Inclusion through Fintech at ZoneTech Park in Gbagada, Lagos, Nigeria.
The EFInA brought together some of the biggest players in the fintech industry and focused on how to improve financial inclusion in the country.
According to statistics, more than 36% of Nigeria’s population do not have access to basic financial services while millions of Nigerian with banking services remained underserved or get less financial services than they should. The issue was discussed at the EFInA conference while looking out for solutions to it.
The event started off with the opening speech by the Head of Partnership at Big Cabal Media, Chidi Uguru and followed with the keynote remarks by EFInA CEO, Esaie Diei. Diei delivered a short overview of the objectives of fintech organizations and the highlights of the event.
According to Stephen Ambore, Head of Digital Financial Services at the CBN who spoke right after the event, the banking regulator holds an important role in improving financial inclusion. He then said that CBN has done much to do so.
Ambore added, in order to make fintechs to thrive fully, there’s a need for regulators to “sit with fintechs” so that they can develop the regulatory environment to achieve financial inclusion. In other words, with the appropriate regulation, access to funding, corporate governance limitations are some of the efforts that will help to create a better fintech ecosystem in Nigeria.
The EFInA conference concluded with giving grants to six Nigerian fintechs that showed great performance in terms of quality and creativity of their products. These six startups are Social Lender, Riby Finance, Capricorn Digital, CredPal, Extramile Africa, and SmartTeller. The first three startups won $2 million grant under the growth stage category while the other three received $2 million grant under the startup category.
Source: technext.ng
