Are Nigerian fintechs building what small businesses need?

Feb 06, 2023|Nchedolisa Akuma

Key questions this article answers:

  1. Informal businesses can’t get loans from commercial banks because they lack basic Know-Your-Customer (KYC) documentation. What’s needed to formalise Nigeria’s 42 million micro-businesses? 

  2. Nearly 60% of small businesses already have a formal financial account, so why is Nigeria’s SME financing gap still worse than the Sub-Saharan average?

 

In our world today, for every problem, there is an app.

Ordering food, predicting the weather, getting driving directions, finding bae. Just name it.

There’s no better feeling than an app that just gets what you need, how and when you need it. In short, without Netflix, where will we all be?

In two words, Jeff Bezos, former CEO of Amazon, summed up what makes great apps (or solutions) so sticky: ‘customer obsession’.

It’s easy to restrict what Bezos meant to retail consumers like you and me. After all, Amazon is a consumer goods giant. But businesses are also customers, specifically, customers of business-to-business (B2B) companies.

Think of your current employer. The software solution they use to pay your salary at the end of every month is likely provided by a B2B software company.

In the financial services ecosystem, B2B companies provide various financial solutions, including payroll, inventory management, vendor payments, financing etc.

But today, we will focus on fintechs that provide financial solutions to specific kinds of businesses—the small but mighty MSMEs (Micro-small, small and medium enterprises).

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