Are you curious to know how fintech can improve your payment processes and help you launch innovative new products? Learn the top 5 benefits of fintech for businesses.
Kenya has become a global hub for Fintech innovation. The fintech market in the country is worth an estimated $4.9 billion, but its impact is much greater. The massive success of M-Pesa highlights this impact.
The success of M-Pesa provided the motivation and impetus for the many fintechs that have since entered the Kenyan financial ecosystem. For these fintechs aiming for an M-Pesa-sized success story, the thriving SME sector and expanding middle class are the big prizes.
At the national level, fintech promotes economic growth by attracting foreign direct investment, easing payments, and boosting productivity. But while it has benefits for customers, too, this article will explore the benefits of fintech for businesses.
Let’s get started.
What is the main purpose of fintech?
Fintech stands for financial technology, which is new technology and software that improve and automate financial transactions.
At the most basic level, fintech enables financial inclusion by giving previously unbanked sectors of the population access to banking services.
An example is M-Pesa, a mobile banking service that allows storing and transferring money using mobile phones.
By its impact, fintech typically seeks to disrupt traditional financial institutions by offering faster, more convenient, and more cost-effective ways to receive money and make payments.
At the business level, fintech applications and APIs help businesses manage their financial operations and streamline payment processes.
Let’s now take a closer look at how fintech benefits businesses.
Benefits of using fintech for businesses
We have discussed M-Pesa and how it has enabled financial inclusion by giving previously unbanked people the tools to transfer money electronically, pay safely and conveniently, and save money using their mobile phones.
There are other fintechs that have disrupted finance, such as peer-to-peer lending platforms like UbaPesa and Pezesha, that offer easier access to credit for parts of the population traditional banks exclude.
On the B2B side, Intasend, a fintech that provides payment infrastructure businesses need to make and receive payments, helps connect consumer-facing technologies like a mobile money wallet with merchants to enable online money transfers and payments.
Among other products and features, Intasend offers:
- a payment gateway for online merchants,
- a digital wallet for its business account holders,
- an API for those who want to deploy their digital wallets,
- virtual Visa and Mastercard debit cards, and
- subscription software for businesses that want to collect recurring payments from customers.
Here are other benefits that a fintech like Intasend provides for customers:
1. Improved payment convenience.
Modern business demands the ability to make payments faster, safer, and more convenient. While safe, traditional payment systems through banks have often been slow, with many steps involved.
Fintech has enabled innovations that solve the problem of payment speed. Two-factor authentication, which simplifies payment security and removes the need to physically present yourself at the bank to authorise payment, is one of those innovations.
To improve payment convenience even more, Intasend technology, for example, allows businesses to accept multiple payment methods for online sales and payments. These include M-Pesa, debit cards, Visa and Mastercard, and even Bitcoin.
2. Helps to automate accounting processes.
Through APIs, fintech tools can help can gather data from various sources, aggregate it in one place, and store it online for easier access. This allows you to automate accounting processes and enable accounting in the cloud.
This data is also collected and available in real-time, which speeds up decision-making for businesses. With Intasend, users of our payment gateway and subscription software can access real-time sales data, which gives them a bird’s-eye view of their business and cash flow.
Real-time visualisation of sales and accounting data also makes it easier to spot and analyse trends. You can better explore ways to improve your processes and cut costs with the insights you draw from that data.
3. Automates invoicing
Creating and sending invoices the traditional, manual way is time-consuming. Manual invoice processing is labour-intensive and increases the incidence of errors and lost, duplicate, and fake invoices.
Intasend not only adds online invoice functionality but also unlocks the ability to generate easy-to-share no-code payment links that make it easy for clients to pay.
4. Digitises money management.
Digitisation can eliminate up to 90% of finance-related tasks. Not only does this free up resources to improve the actual product and serve customers more intimately, but it also reduces costs and improves business efficiency.
Digitising money management also entails making financial data easily accessible to those who need it. With easier access to financial reports, for example, through mobile apps, people can work on the go and make faster business decisions.
5. Aids innovation.
Developing tech products requires expert skills, big budgets, and significant time investment. This is where a fintech like Intasend proves its worth by availing the technology businesses need to build and deploy payment tools for their customers.
By using APIs, merchants can embed the Intasend payment gateway on their checkout pages to easily accept multiple payment methods from customers. So, instead of integrating M-Pesa, Visa, Mastercard, and Bitcoin payment methods individually, they can aggregate them all with Intasend.
The same applies to lending apps that must provide a digital wallet as part of their product. Through our wallet-as-a-service offering, Intasend can provide the required infrastructure through an API or our SDK toolkit, which saves both time and money and removes the tech barrier that hamstrings so many startups.
So, a fintech like Intasend aids innovation by making tech more accessible for under-capitalised startups and allows them to compete with better-resourced tech giants.
Fintech has also helped democratise finance by enabling small startups with disruptive ideas to develop products that promote inclusion and improve access to cheaper finance.
Get the technology to process and accept payments faster and safely.
The funding market is overwhelmed with startups looking for finance. As a result, it can take an age to bring your unique idea to market. That is, if another startup does not bring the idea to market before you do.
Thankfully, you can build on top of existing infrastructure, which saves you time and software development costs. Intasend’s payment infrastructure allows businesses to accept payments and disburse payments and loans without building the necessary technology on their own.
Do you want to build a loan disbursement platform, a peer-to-peer money transfer app, launch a mobile wallet, accept online payments from customers, or implement the subscription model in your business? Intasend has the best technology in the Kenyan market to do this faster and cost-effectively. Our technology is fully customisable and offers many ways to pay and get paid.
Waste no time getting your business off the ground and bringing your unique idea to market. Sign up for an Intasend business account here to explore the many ways fintech can help you build financial products consumers love.
