Banks must become ‘invisible’ to compete in digital finance

Banks must anticipate customers’ needs and embed financial services into everyday transactions to compete with digital platforms, executives from Access Holdings and OPay told Moonshot by TechCabal in Lagos.

Daniel Awe, head of Fintech Foundry at Access Holdings, said banking’s next phase would require institutions to offer services when customers needed them, rather than wait for people to visit a branch or open an application.

“The future of banks is going to be in everyday people, where banks become invisible,” he said during a panel titled “The Next Bank: Competing in the Age of Programmable Money”.

His argument extends the shift from branch banking to mobile services. Moving a transaction onto a phone changes how customers access a bank; integrating finance into activities such as paying school fees or replenishing stock changes when they encounter it.

“When the customer is engaging you, it’s not the future of banking. It’s the banks that now have to place themselves in the life of the customer,” Awe said.

Chukwudinma Okafor, chief compliance officer at OPay Nigeria, said the starting point should be customers’ practical needs, rather than the availability of new technology.

“For us at OPay, the major focus is just to address one thing, and that’s customers. You have to meet the customers where they need you,” he said.

OPay sent developers, technology professionals and sales teams to markets across Nigeria to observe how traders worked and gather feedback, Okafor said. Requests for different sounds to signal successful and failed point-of-sale transactions illustrated how small changes could make a service more useful.

The example highlighted a distinction in the discussion: anticipating customers’ needs can involve sophisticated infrastructure, but the improvement customers value may be straightforward.

Modernising the systems

Awe said traditional banks would also need to overhaul the infrastructure supporting their products. Conventional core banking systems alone were insufficient for competing with fintechs and technology companies offering financial services.

That transition would have to be gradual, preserving reliability and compliance while addressing the risks created by increasingly interconnected systems.

“Whatever you want to achieve, you have to put security in the middle,” he said.

Okafor said digital-first companies had benefited from starting with more modern infrastructure, including cloud-based systems, while established banks were increasingly adopting similar technologies.

Despite their competition for customers, both speakers argued that banks and fintechs remained dependent on one another.

Awe said partnerships combined banks’ financial capabilities with fintechs’ ability to serve particular customer groups. Some businesses required approaches that companies such as OPay could provide more readily, he added.

Okafor pointed to fintechs’ reliance on commercial banks for settlement and the handling of customer funds. Cooperation was also necessary to respond to fraud when money moved between institutions.

“Ultimately, we need each other for the ecosystem to work well,” he said.

The discussion also turned to Nigeria’s approach to cryptocurrency and stablecoins, with Awe describing differing priorities among regulators.

He said the Securities and Exchange Commission had shown greater appetite for cryptocurrency-related activities, while the Central Bank of Nigeria had been more cautious because of monetary policy and consumer protection concerns.

According to Awe, the central bank was examining stablecoin use cases through a regulatory sandbox, allowing approved participants to test services under supervision.

He characterised stablecoins as less volatile than other cryptocurrencies. That distinction was his assessment of their appeal to the regulator, rather than a guarantee of their stability.

For banks weighing new technologies, the broader challenge identified by the panel was to make services easier to access while maintaining the security and reliability customers expected. Becoming less visible in a transaction would require substantial work on the systems behind it.