With the increase in online transactions, people want to enjoy the ease of doing business, hence the need for open banking which makes life easy for individuals, and businesses.
Zeeh Africa, a fintech company that facilitates seamless access to high-quality financial data and safe direct bank payment, is providing more secure interoperability in open banking by saving the cost and stress of integrating multiple platforms.
Under the umbrella of digital financing, Zeeh focuses on providing a system for companies that want to verify their users’ data or creditworthiness.
It gets its clients’ statements to show to companies that their clients for example, have been paid for a certain number of months, therefore, this is a working class citizen, and can be reliable.
“One of the major reasons why we are doing what we do with our slogan ‘one integration, multiple service’ is to ease the business among financial services providers and their customers, as well as curtail fraud in the financial system.
“We need to ensure that if a user is onboarding on a loan platform, the details that he will provide must be related to its real identity, such that the user doesn’t get to create multiple accounts with fake identity on the platform to take loans and not pay back,” David Adeleke, CEO, Zeeh Africa said.
For its customers who will need the services of verification platforms such as Identity Pass or Verify Me for their clients’ identity check, and likewise mono and okra to authenticate account statements, and direct debit features, Zeeh is bridging the gap by saving the cost and stress of integration on different platforms.
Within three months of its operation, Zeeh has a client base of over 280 registered fintech companies, and these companies have an approximated number of over one million users.
For example, Fair Money, as one of its clients has about 1.3 million users, and in the long run Zeeh gets to serve this larger audience.
Another product Zeeh is building is the universal debit card, which is a business-to-customer model.
Based on the consent of the customers, access is given to their transaction history, and with the help of Zeeh’s machine learning algorithm, it gets to categorize their expenses into a simple graph, for them to be able to track their finances on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
Also, the company has a single card that customers can access all their linked accounts to make debit from the multiple accounts with just one debit card.
“Wouldn’t it be beautiful if you have one card that can access all your bank accounts such that when you go shopping and you have money in different accounts, with a particular debit card, you can withdraw those monies,” Adeleke said.
According to Zeeh, the open banking market is very large and widely untapped in the sense that one of the major advantages of the company to the market at large is the fact that it is helping fintechs to reduce non-performing loans such that with the data of their customers, it gets to share with other companies.
If company A has a loan defaulter through their account statement, and company B requests to see the account statement, Zeeh makes it visible for company B to be aware of the customer’s status which will inform its decision whether to grant them a loan or not.
“We do customer verification services, although not directly linked to digital financing but you can see it as a subset of know your customer (KYC). You have a customer’s National identification number(NIN), and taxpayer identification number, among others, you give it to us, and we are able to give you details about the customer,” Frank Uwajeh, CTO, Zeeh Africa, said.
While the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) made it mandatory for bank B to follow due process and take back the loan a client is owing from their account in bank A as long as there is money in it, Adeleke explains that banks are protecting their customers, thus, making the process difficult despite the order given by the CBN on Global Debit Mandate.
“We see this as an untapped opportunity in the open market system and we are working on a product that will make the process seamless. It will also add to the beauty of the market where there ought to be transparency because banks are priding themselves in the protection of their customers,” Akano Tomilayo, Co-founder, Zeeh Africa, said.
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With its recent entrance into the Hindsight Ventures Accelerator program, Zeeh says this will foster its networking skills, and open it up to mentoring and funding opportunities.
“We are looking to tap into the 41.7 million market in Nigeria alone based on the number of Nigerians with BVN as at last year, and we are making plans to expand into other African countries including Kenya, South Africa, and Ghana before the end of the year to replicate the same model,” Uwajeh said.
