Appzone: The Ultimate Reviews of the Nigerian Fintech Company

Hello Fintech Lovers and Expert, this is another big article. Here I will talk Everything about Appzone - an African Fintech Software Provider, based in Lagos Nigeria which was founded by Emeka Emeterom, Obi Emeterom and Wale Onawunmi in 2008.

Africa's fintech space has been doing quite great over the past few years in investments than traditional banks that face challenges like legacy cost structures and major lack of operational efficiency. Appzone is one of the few companies that builds solution financial institutions - helping them with banking and payment services. The company has engaged in many funding series and Investment. 

What is Appzone and how does it work?

Appzone is a payment infrastructure, banking software and fintech software provider. The company provides proprietary solutions [such as banking and payment services] for financial institution such as banks [commercial, mortgage and micro-finance bank] and those fintech companies. 

How Appzone Works?

Basically, most African Financial Institutions rely on using foreign technology [software] solutions to provide financial services to its users. But base on pricing, lack of tech support and complexity in innovations that always come up make appzone found it ways around providing these services to Africa fintech companies.

Appzone decided to provide the same software that those foreign companies offers with better experience such as better pricing, tech and integrated support, banking and payment services and lending services. The company work as an enabler [at payment rail and the core infrastructure] within banking and payment.

Appzone works as a services firm to provides banks with custom software development services. In 2011, the company launched its first core banking software targeting Micro-finance bank [MFB]. 

About Appzone

A technology company that provides software for commercial and micro-finance bank to offers banking and Payment services to their customers. In 2016, Appzone launched "Branchless Banking". A service that targetted commercial banks to provides mobile and internet banking with an instant card issuance product to their users.

In 2020, appzone released products that caters to end-to-end automation of lending operations Microfinance banks and Blockchain switching.

Appzone Group are used by more than 20 commercial banks and more than 460 Microfinance banks in Africa with amassment of yearly transactions value of $2billions and yearly loan disbursement of $300millions.

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According to what Obi Emeterom, appzone CEO told TechCrunch, the company intend to build out innovative local solutions for banking and Payment in Africa with aim and focus to leverage ability as an enabler to provide proprietary technology solutions to both segment.

We started Appzone with the intention to build out innovative local solutions for banking and payments on the continent. The focus was to leverage our ability as an enabler to create proprietary technology for both segments.

Appzone CEO - Obi Emeterom (image by Appzone)

Appzone was founded in 2008 with a legal Appzone Group. The company focuses on niches of Banking, Fintech, Information Technology, Payment and Software Development.

Appzone's BankOne App

BankOne by Appzone is a digital core banking solutions for Africa's Fintechs and Neobank. The product was launched with the aim to drive potential growth of fully digital offerings.

This service has just been expanded to East Africa with Kenya as it destination.  

About Bankone

BankOne is a platform for technology-driven financial institutions intending to adopt a 360-degree digital approach that does not involve physical branches or human interaction. Presently, the products operates in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Gambia. 

Bankone is hosting more than 10millions customers accounts with balance approximately to $150millions. However, the company still manage to maintain over $650 Million in annual loan disbursements, and $2.9 billion in total transaction value.

Bankone Features, Functions and Benefits/Advantages.

Features

Asides from managing customer records, loans, deposits, and accounting, BankOne provides an omnichannel self-service platform, USSD interfaces, Payment ecosystem integration, agent banking capabilities, and card management services.

Functions

These functionalities are available to Fintechs like digital lenders, neobanks like Kuda and Telda , traditional banks like MFIs, mortgage banks, consumer lenders and commercial banks.

As I said earlier that Africa's Fintech are limited to using foreign technology solutions due to lack of prohibitive pricing, complexity in innovations, poor market fit and a lack of local tech support.

BankOne’s major differentiation lies in its fit-for-purpose functionality and integrations with the local ecosystem of third-party services. These characteristics in addition to ease of customization and availability of local support ensure that the platform seamlessly plugs into the needs of African Banks and Fintechs.

Benefits and Advantages

Appzone BankOne’s major advantages are market fit and affordability which allow financial institutions deliver highly relevant products at a fraction of cost while leveraging our numerous integrations with mainstream payment systems to achieve instant interoperability with other industry players at no extra cost.

Bankone is offered and manage by Appzone core, a subsidiary of Appzone group.

Appzone Blockchain Based Payments Processor.

Appzone Blockchain payment processor is the continent's first Blockchain platform that facilitates inter-banks transactions for both fiat and digital currencies to be processed directly between banks without the involvement of any intermediaries. This products was developed by Appzone Switch, a subsidiary of Appzone Group.

About Appzone Blockchain Network

Appzone Blockchain also called Zone Switch was built to cater for Africa's Businesses that are lacking payment processing settlings. The platform has powered 10 Nigerian Banks including Guarantee Trust Bank [GTB], United Bank For Africa [UBA] and Zenith Bank - helping them to process some of their customers transactions.

How does it works?

Zone Switch is an intra-africa payment, it aim is similar to that of Pan Africa Payments and Settlement System [PAPSS], an instant payment system led by the Africa Export-Import Bank Afreximabank and Africa Continent's Free Trade Area, AFCFTA. Both project works to make payment in Africa instant, seamless and cost-effective with least friction possible.

Advantages and Benefits.

Appzone Blockchain Network also known as Zone Switch Blockchain System is supposedly more reliable and enable faster payment settlements.

Appzone’s motivation for the product was based on the growing adoption of crypto as a faster alternative for peer-to-peer transactions. For instance, two friends sending money to each other or families from one African country to another. In the book of records, Africa has the fastest cryptocurrency adoption rate in the world, recording 1,200% growth between July 2020 and June 2021.

Fintech and Banks within the Africa countries usually performed inter-bank payments through centralized Electronic Financial Transaction (EFT) switches which serve as single points of contact between financial institution and handle settlement at defined intervals. However, they usually cause major problems such as downtime when they fail and generate reconciliation issues in certain situations. Zone Switch has enhanced this by providing a decentralized system where institutions involves connects directly with one another, so that there is no need for central infrastructure and no single failure can affect the entire network.

Zone significantly reduces transaction processing charges and costs. The network also improves customers experience for end-users while ensuring that beneficiaries always get instant payment for each transaction and that settlement can happen in real-time. For Inter-bank payments, Zone Switch offers real-time settlement layers with a fiat-backed digital token for settlement that allows Banks and payment companies to process transactions across countries without worrying about how, and in which currency, to effect settlement.

With 10 commercial Banks in Nigeria already connected to the network, Zone offers Banks and Fintechs with simple Application Program Interface [APIs] for various types of transactions including cash transfer, account-to-account transfer and merchants payment at ATMs or agent locations. The platform's network receives high through-put and record transaction success rates, while elvacuating typical reconciliation issues that delay refunds to customers where necessary.

Zone Switch represents the cashless and borderless future of payments in Africa. With an unprecedented level of network redundancy and security, the platform will eliminate the systemic risk associated with centralized payment systems while delivering the uptime and throughput required in a truly cashless society. Said Zone Switch CEO - Uche Elendu.

Furthermore, the team at Appzone Switch are working to evolve the platform's digital token for settlement into a stable Pan-African digital currency that is fully compliant, approved by central Banks, and backed by a basket of fiat currencies in Africa. [As we all know that most Africa countries are not in support of cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin and Ethereum.] The idea will be for Zone to manage and maintain stablecoin wallets for individuals on the same distributed ledger that currently facilitates payment authorization and settlement.

Appzone Lend

This is a system that automates the entire lending process from offering of loans to disbursement and repayment collection.

How does it works?

Appzone Lend participating banks provides a direct debit service based on unique bank IDs and single global debit mandates that authorise loan repayment amounts to be taken from any of a borrower’s accounts in any Nigerian bank.

Benefits and Advantages

This helps to remove human effort from the lending process to the repayment collection. Also appzone is looking to reduce the cost of lending operations hence making loans cheaper and more accessible while improving bank NPL ratios and overall profitability.

Appzone POS

This service is also called Appzone Grid. A technology that allows agent to deliver Financial service to the underbank people where there's no are no physical bank branches.

How does it works?

The unbanked will be able to perform cash deposits, cash withdrawals, fund transfers, bill payments, account opening and loan origination amongst others, simply by using their atm card to carryout these transactions from appzone POS.

Appzone POS agent banking platform bypasses traditional intermediaries in the value chain, they are able to offer banks and third party agents the lowest fees and most reliable services in the industry. This is the major advantages and benefits regarding this network.

Appzone Cards

Appzone coming with a mission to digitalized and automate card across banks in Africa with the aim to reduce cost of transactions, at the same time to offer speed and convenience to the account holder.

How does it works?

Appzone card management platform, Prime, manages and maintains all aspects of Card services including processing, transaction processing, settlement, issue resolution, personalisation and reconciliation. 

Prime is Nigeria’s defacto card management platform responsible for issuing more than 80% of all payment cards provided to account holders by banks annually.

Benefits and Advantages

The major benefit of the appzone card is to reduce the cost of transaction and at the same time offers speed and convenience to the card holder.

Appzone Contact Us Information

You can quickly connect with appzone via any of the below networks.

• Appzone Group Official website: https://appzonegroup.com
• Appzone Head Office: 12b, Admiralty Way, Lekki Phase 1, Lagos.
• Phone: +2348023425699
• Supported Email: info@appzonegroup.com

You can also write a massage to them by using the "Contact Us Form" at the button of your screen when you visit the homepage.

FAQs

What does Appzone do?

Appzone is a fintech software provider that offers service that enables banks to provides banking and payment services to their customers. Banks includes, commercial banks, Microfinance banks, Neobank and lot more.

Who owns Appzone?

Appzone is own by three main man, Emeka Emeterom, Obi Emeterom and Wale Onawunmi. The company was founded in 2008, 14 years back. Appzone has many CEO, one of them is Uche Elendu.

What is Bankone and Does it Exit?

Bankone is a product of Appzone which is still exiting till date. The product is to offer digital core banking solutions to Africa bank and Neobank.

How much is Appzone Salary?

Appzone has a different salary range. Some of them are highlighted below.

• Software Engineer: NGN235,333 per month
• Software Developer: NGN235,000 per month
• Tech Support Contractor: NGN52,000 per month
• IT Unit: NGN124,000 per month
• Lead Network Engineer: NGN207,000 per month
• Software Tester: NGN208,000 per month
• Reginal Manager Core Banking Application: NGN10 Millions per year
• Information Technology Contractor: NGN104,000 per month
• Tech Manager: NGN450,000 per month
• Data Analyst: NGN104,000 per month
• Mobile Developer: NGN150,000 per month

For more information about Appzone Salary, visit this page.

Where can I download Appzone Mobile App

At the moment, appzone group does not possesses a mobile application.

Appzone Clients

Appzone has partner with many companies within and outside Nigeria. Notwithstanding, I will mention some banks I know Appzone is working for. And they are: Access Bank, First Monument City Bank, Fidelity Bank, Ecobank, Heritage Bank, Guarantee Trust Bank, First Bank of Nigeria, Providus Bank, Keystone Bank, Sterling Bank, Polaris Bank, Stannic Bank, Unity Bank, Union Bank, United Bank for Africa, Wema Bank and Zenith Bank.

Appzone Subsidiary

As you can see, Appzone Subsidiary consist of the core which is software for banks, POS which is Financial service provider for the unbanked, Switch - a Blockchain Network for payment processing in Africa, Cards for digital payment and Appzone Lead to support people who are in need of Financial support.