This was a very interesting read and while I agree that it’s very hard to integrate and scale new product features/services we need to remember that the alternative(to these products) comes in two ways

1. The current way of doing the thing. E.g investments — banks, asset managers, etc

2. Non-consumption because 1 takes too long, is too expensive or isn’t worth it for a lot of people.

This leads us to a third point, because of 1 and 2, you literally have millions of people who don’t engage in the activity at all. They’re hundreds and thousand times more than the people who use any of the services listed in this article.

Let’s take Carbon as an example.

From Carbon’s 2020 results as highlighted by TechCrunch here:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/nigerian-digital-bank-carbon-hit-240m-in-payments-processed-last-year-up-89-from-2019/

“For the fiscal year 2020, the company, which has about 659,000 customers, said it processed ₦96.54 billion (~$241.35 million), up 89% compared to the same period a year ago. For its lending arm, disbursement volume was ₦25.21 billion (~$63 million), up 9.1% from FY2019. Also, ₦13.02 billion (~$32.55 million) worth of investments was made on the platform, representing a 365% increase from the previous year.”

Would you say Carbon has struggled to sell its investment products? The number is about half the amount of disbursed loans and is up by 365%. In the middle of some of the worst economic situations Nigeria has experienced.

There’s also a lot of data from the CBN,NCC, NIBSS and from key players themselves about just how many people use some of these services.

Cash is still the dominant factor for transactions. More people are still offline. Of the people who are online, only a small number of them can afford to be online as much as they wish to be. These numbers are growing fast though and more people are coming online and spending more time(and money) online as the technology stack or ecosystem grows.

This means that although there are multiple savings apps, most people do not in fact and by data, save on any app at all. The top 2 savings & investment platforms — Piggyvest and Cowrywise have not scratched up to a quarter of the possible total available market as at today. Stears wrote this report about agent networks for financial transactions and there’s still SO much of Nigeria’s working population that hasn’t been reached that it’ll be a little bit ridiculous for us to think that any company has peaked.

https://www.stearsng.com/premium/article/banking-through-agents-a-successful-path-to-inclusion

These are just some thoughts I had while reading this. Very thought provoking peace and I enjoyed it.