International money transfers were once tedious and expensive, a state of affairs gladly changed by the rise of fintech and the digitization of the world’s financial infrastructure. And for a long time, fintech rested on its laurels to some extent, selling speed as the main reason to use it over a traditional bank wire transfer when firing funds from Nigeria to Canada, and vice versa.
However, this selling point is far from unique, and the top operators are having to up their game to retain that all-important market share.
Focusing on FX
The Naira (NGN) is a currency that’s a little more prone to significant fluctuations than many others, which means any user who’s using it in some capacity when making a long-distance transfer will be very sensitive to foreign exchange markups.
For that reason, the baseline promise of speed that fintech provides now has to be combined with the additional advantage of eliminating FX spreads and guaranteeing locked-in rates before a transfer takes place. It’s all about eliminating uncertainty and providing transparency.
Providing Compliance
With stricter enforcement from financial regulators in both jurisdictions, covered by FINTRAC (Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada) and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), speed means nothing if accounts are arbitrarily frozen or transfers fail compliance checks midway. That’s especially true for heavily regulated markets like iGaming, and since this type of activity has become regulated in Canada and people can enjoy blackjack and slots online, regulatory scrutiny is also more intense.
From a fintech perspective, the platforms that build seamless, automated KYC (Know Your Customer) workflows and robust anti-money laundering (AML) screening also earn long-term user trust, while steering clear of the ire of regulators in both countries.
Enabling Cross-Border, Multicurrency Banking
Canada’s Nigerian diaspora has a lot more money management at its fingertips thanks to fintech, so sending cash back home as and when isn’t the only thing they’re looking for in a platform. Convenience takes top billing, and compatibility with multiple currencies while still baking in cross-border functionality is also a minimum expectation.
In response to this, modern fintech solutions are moving beyond single-shot remittance transfers to offer virtual CAD and NGN multi-currency accounts. Users can hold, exchange, and spend funds across borders without needing separate local bank accounts in both countries.
Billing Integration
The final thing fintech has managed to optimize in light of what customers are looking for when they want to make Nigeria-Canada payments regularly is the compatibility with other ecosystems, most notably the billing services used by a whole range of service providers across utilities, healthcare, communications, and so on.
It’s all about keeping payments managed within a single ecosystem, so that when funds are sent or received, they can easily be used to meet other financial obligations without first being transferred to yet another platform. With the middleman taken out of the equation, people who live their lives internationally aren’t having to keep several plates spinning in order to manage their money from moment to moment.
