For Oradian’s partners the accolades keep rolling in!
We were delighted and proud to hear that Nigerian lending service Creditville had won two leading titles at the recent West Africa Innovation Awards 2021: Africa’s Most Innovative Lending Service Brand of the Year; and Most Admired Consumer Finance and Investment Company of the Year.
Organised by Africa Brands Media, the West Africa Innovation Awards has established itself as the continent’s top fintech innovation event, forging up-and-coming competitors into recognised industry leaders.
It came as no surprise to us, looking back at the stellar growth of Creditville even during the unfavourable market environment of the pandemic.
Nor are Creditville the first of our partners to scoop one of the major rewards in finance and technology. Recently, Cantilan Bank in the Philippines won the NorthStar Impact Award at the Inaugural APIX Awards at the Singapore Fintech Festival 2021.
These incredible achievements make us proud, and also give us the confidence that we’re doing something right as we turn the cogs of the core machinery that enables this market success.
The ingredients for success
So, what are the ingredients of these “overnight success stories”, and what does it take to recognise a true leader in financial inclusion?
To us, it starts with leadership and vision. More specifically, a vision of what you want the financial inclusion market to look like, and a mission to change it. A visionary leadership should empower the organization to begin executing that mission straight away.
Then, once all the stakeholders have been empowered to seize that market opportunity and begin using digital technology to innovate, you need the flexibility take any digital channel and use it to feed your aggressive new customer acquisition strategy. For any successful financial institution, that flexibility comes in the form of open APIs on top of your core system.
These comprehensive open APIs allow your team to focus on the innovative products that the market desires without worrying about technicalities, regulatory reporting, calculations and other less exciting complications.
And if you can focus on the market impact, delivering exciting services, and executing your plan, the results will soon follow.
The basic elements of business success have been the same since the dawn of time. These days, we simply add a layer of complication with technology and procedure. But if a provider offers a product that the market craves, does it quicker and in a less complicated way than the competition, market success will come on its own.
The big difference from the past is the pace of change, and the ever-shrinking patience of customers in this “Age of Instantly”.
Strong foundations
But there’s another ingredient, one that to most onlookers is totally invisible, and that’s a flexible but reliable foundation: the core banking system underpinning your organisation’s innovative ideas. Once you’ve got the rest of your house in order, an open central system that plugs into the rest of your architecture (and anything you might add in the future) gives you the reliability and confidence to keep innovating.
Just focus on your guiding North Star and hit the gas – don’t sweat the details. The market always follows the leaders.
If you’re interested in discovering how Oradian’s cloud-based core banking system can unlock growth for your business, get in touch with one of our business intelligence experts for a free overview of the Oradian system.
