Banks, Fintech Firms Should Not Operate as Rivals—Ajalie

Mr Ajalie said the industry’s regulator, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), has delineated what each entity should do and how they should function in creating a successful payment ecosystem that protects consumers and enables businesses, which he admitted to be complementary and not competitive.

Touching on the imperative of borderless transactions and the solutions for implementation concerning the framework, he said, “Borderless transactions have to happen because we’re becoming more interconnected by the day and by the minute.”

“We still have a lot of siloed implementations among key stakeholders and unless we recalibrate our systems, borderless remains beyond our reach and a mirage,” Mr Ajalie stated at the Committee of e-Business Industry Heads (CeBIH) conference in Lagos themed Payment System Vision 2030: Navigating Contemporary Issues in Driving Future Growth.

“There’s the fierce urgency of now that demands that we find solid ways to interconnect, and once we’re able to interconnect within ourselves, reconcile properly, especially on the local front, then we can present a single, unified front that will enable us to push transactions and receive transactions from outside.

“We cannot go forward without fixing these internal challenges,” he added at the event, where he was one of the panellists.

TeamApt, a subsidiary of Moniepoint Incorporated, facilitates payment processing across many industries while enabling reliable payments for banks and their customers while reducing operating costs.

Wrapping up his thoughts, the TeamApt boss reiterated the need for industry-wide collaborations in fighting the menace of fraud.

“If we are able to all share information and collaborate seamlessly, we’ll find out that it becomes disinteresting for these bad faith individuals to use the collective technology commonwealth that we have all built to commit nefarious activities.

“So, it goes back to collaboration among fintechs, the banks, NFIU, infrastructure providers, the telcos, and switches. We’ve all got to come together to say, enough is enough and that this present situation threatens all of us rather than just one of us,” he added.