Financial Services Not an End in Themselves alone, But Enablers – Yinka David-West

Professor Olayinka David-West, an Academic Director at Lagos Business School Executive Education and Lead, Sustainable and Inclusive Digital Financial Services had stated that financial services are not an end in themselves alone, but enablers to facilitate ease of financial flow in the entire value chain.

She disclosed this while speaking as a member of the panellists comprising of award-winning female experts and business leaders at the African Women CEOs Network webinar which took place on Thursday, May 21, 2020 with the theme: African Fintech: Financial Services Solutions.

While canvassing for a sustainable and inclusive approach to financial services, she stated that, “Financial services are not an end in themselves alone, they are enablers in general. So, how do we embed then into the value chains, in terms of easing the financial flow which is one of the biggest problems in a lot of our value chains? In the sense where physical products stop to move because the money or evidence of it is stuck somewhere. So, if you think of Nigeria for example, that’s one of the reasons why we have a lot of wastage in our food products and in our agriculture sector. So, I think we need to broaden the sector, we need to think about it from an inclusive perspective and we need to ensure that there’s collaboration”.

While highlighting the challenge of digital financial onboarding process in Nigeria, she said, “Take Nigeria for instance, we still haven’t gotten it right in many ways, as cash was still used in the recent distribution of palliatives. How do we onboard people quickly? One of the biggest issues we have is that of identity poverty because there is no way to do KYC easily. We don’t have a functional identity system to back the financial systems”.

She charged Fintechs in the continent to reinvent their current model of delivering financial services solutions for sustainability and growth in order to navigate the new normal post-pandemic.

On the opportunities presented by the pandemic, Olayinka David-West affirmed that “I think this is a call to action in exploring ways to collaborate rather than building disparate systems, knowing that we can all leverage a harmonized architecture. Because we cannot afford to continue building disparate systems with disparate sources of data, as we need to begin to harmonize things now. So, the opportunities are there, just that we don’t all need to jump into payments to the detriment of many other areas that are largely untapped”.

At the end of the session, there was somewhat of a consensus amongst the panellists that there’s a greater need to have a uniform digital infrastructure to enable a digital economy across Africa.

© 2020