NaijaPay (By Team Alpha)

NaijaPay is a seamless offline payment system with fraud detection, It supports major languages in Nigeria ( Yourba, Igbo, Hausa, English) to include the informal sector and drive financial inclusion

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Inspiration

We discovered that a lot of people in Nigeria do not use financial technologies because of fraud issues, While a large majority of the informal sector doesn’t understand financial technologies as they are not tailored to suit them. I discovered that a lot of informal people who do not understand English or understand partially, And these people will rather use a system that communicates to them in their native language. People now prefer to remain unbanked and stick with cash transactions due to these issues.

What it does

  1. Naijapay solves these issues with a seamless offline payment system using USSD to enable the inclusion of more people who don’t have Internet-enabled phones(mostly informal people) and also the off-line access drives inclusion for people in areas where internet connection is not reliable.

  2. Naijapay supports major languages in Nigeria ( Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, English) to include the informal sector and drive financial inclusion, People who do not understand English will trust a system that supports their native language.


 3. Naijapay includes fraud detection as we study customer behavior using transaction history using AI(Artificial Intelligence). We are able to identity fraud when a transaction is out of customer behavior. With Artificial Intelligence we know that a certain Mr. Tunde Badmus won’t make a 20k transaction at 4am on Sunday morning because that is not his nature So we flag the transaction for other means of verification like a backup pin.

  1. Naijapay also provides a feature that enables you to add a guarantor to your profile. Your guarantor must have a BVN, So this enables us to reach and identify more people who don’t have BVN through people who have BVN. This works great for the informal sector who currently do things like “Ajo” which is group savings. Now we can reach and identify people in remote local communities through people that have BVN, who know them and stand as guarantors for them.

How I built it

  1. USSD is our customer interfacing channel as it supports offline access. We used FSI Sandbox African talking service to enable us to build our USSD application.

  2. We used Nibss BVN Validation within FSI Sandbox Environment to validate BVNs. To confirm customer with BVN details for identity.

  3. We use analysis of past customer transactions through artificial intelligence to create customer behavioral patterns to prevent fraud.
  4. We built language flexible modules for major languages in Nigeria. So customers can choose his desired language.
  5. We used google translator to enable language flexibility.

Challenges I ran into

---Integration with FSI Sandbox Services (Nibss BVN Validation and Africatalking for USSD) that we needed was quite hard because of time, But we were able to scale through and get it done.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of


—Brainstorming a great idea that solves real problems in our country.
—Building a prototype within the timeframe of the hackathon.

What I learned

—Teamwork and quick thinking

What's next for NaijaPay (By Team Alpha)

  1. We look to add other means of authentications for transactions like native language voice call to meet deep scenarios like a blind man that understand only Igbo should be able to make transactions through a phone call in his native language. 

  2. We are also looking at distress codes or words within transaction calls to identify when a customer is performing transactions under distress to enable us to fail over the transaction.

    We believe these will further drive financial inclusion as it establishes security from frauds and gains customer trust.

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