How we are leveraging blockchain technology to ease payment and empower financial institutions — Appzone Chief Sales Officer, Francis Ogbuka

In this interview with Mathew Ibiyemi, Deputy Business Editor of Nigerian NewsDirect, Francis Ogbuka, Vice President and Chief Sales Officer, Appzonespeaks on the evolution of Appzone, its competitive advantage over competitors and its strategy to maximize financial inclusion.

Since your foray into the industry, what are the metrics that make you edge out other competitors?

Appzone has been a foremost provider of financial technology solutions to commercial banks and OFIs. We have developed and operate a proprietary core banking application, which is a service mostly catered to OFIs including microfinance banks. Today, over 450 microfinance banks are utilising the Bank One core banking application.Our vast experience in financial technology has made us suited for this phase of our evolution into a payment infrastructure company.

The whole idea of evolving is to enable existing players in the space with the capabilities to process payment transactions in a much more efficient manner. Our platform supports 99.99% uptime availability to participating institutions and boasts of a transaction processing capacity of 1,000 transactions per second.On average we are about 40% cheaper than other existing players across specific payment transaction use cases. These we believe provides us an edge over our contemporaries.

What are your unique offerings as a company?

Apart from our range of SaaS services, Appzone has developed a blockchain payment network called Zone. Zone allows participating institutions on our network, more control over their digital payment transaction processing capabilities. We do this in such a way that makes the transactions faster, more reliable, and efficient. In a nutshell, what we are doing at Appzone is empowering participating institutions. We have on the network the capabilities to route or in layman’sterms, send transactions and receive transactions from each other in a peer-to-peer fashion.

The benefit of this and building on top of blockchain is that it provides more transparency. Institutions on the network at every point in time can have a grasp of the final status of transactions routed and this doesn’t just cut across Commercial Banks.The network is all-inclusive,and this entails enabling different players from Commercial Banks to traditional OFIs as well as fintechs, the capabilities for peer-to-peer routing.

Taking cognizance of the volume of transactions your platform must be processing, what kind of security architecture has been put in place?

One good thing we have done with Zone is utilising the key elements of blockchain technology to provide a private network that ensures records are tamper-proof.

This makes it very difficult for bad actors to take advantage or manipulate records by hacking into a particular node. By eliminating acentralised point of exposure we have as well eliminated a central failure point.

As an organization actively providing FinTech services, what is your strategy to bridge the gap in terms of accessibility to financial services? 

By evolving into a payment infrastructure company, we are essentially providing the rails for other financial and payment service providers to build on. The benefits of leveraging our solution can be seen in the enhanced experience to end users. This can further be translated to a scenario where bottlenecks that hitherto made it unappealing for the underbanked to trust formal financial services, gain more trust in the system.

Appzone has been around for a while. What are the challenges you have faced so far and how have you tackled them?

The payment industry in Nigeria has seen a lot of growth, particularly over the last decade and this speaks to the impact of the Regulator as well.

More players have come into the payment space offering unique customer experiences. Before now, if you wanted to access payment services as a business or as an individual, you would typically need to approach a commercial bank but the central bank by introducing other license categorieswith less stringent capital base requirements makes it possible for innovative start-ups to focus on specific financial service domains such as payments, lending, etc.

To complement the regulator’s easing of the barrier to entry, operators are doubling down on innovation, and this is evidenced by the surge in growth witnessed over the last decade. Our mission at Appzone is to maintain leadership when it comes to providing innovative next-generation financial technology solutions.