“Eneke the bird says that since men have learned to shoot without missing, he has learned to fly without perching”.
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart.
Nigeria’s fledgling fintech industry has recorded a number of successes in recent years. In 2019, foreign direct investments in Nigeria’s fintech space grew to $460,000,000 (Four Hundred And Sixty Million Dollars)[1]. In March 2021, Flutterwave, a payment designing platform, was reported by Techcrunch[2] to be valued at $1,000,000,000 (One Billion Dollars). This comes in the wake of the purchase of Paystack, another online payment platform, for $200,000,000 (Two Hundred Million Dollars) by American fintech giants – Stripe in October, 2020.[3]
It is without a doubt that the successes recorded by these fintech companies are owed to the positive benefits offered by their technological disruption of traditional banking practices. The speed, convenience, and reductions in the costs of transactions are but a few notable mentions in this regard.
Inspite of the exponential growth of Fintech in Nigeria and the attendant successes, there abound inherent concerns associated with it in many regards. These include unclear regulations, fear of fraud, chargebacks, lack of trust, cybersecurity and data privacy issues. This piece focuses on the challenges in the Fintech space,and how AI in the form of Regtech can help address them.
Indeed, regulators (the government) now strongly rely on Regtech which is essentially the application of technology to ensure regulatory compliance. It is this tactic of solving Fintech problems via Regtech that this article discusses.