Moniepoint Group, the parent company of Moniepoint MFB has denied claims by the CEO of Educare, Alex Onyia that its system was layered on the infrastructure of GTBank.
Responding to a post on X by the Educare CEO, Moniepoint said its engineers built its infrastructure internally and not layered on any bank.
While acknowledging that there could be collaborations among financial institutions, the company said it is wrong and unfounded to assert that it routes its transactions through GTBank.
The claim
Alex in his post stated:
- “Moniepoint main infrastructure is 95% layered on GTBank. While GTBank may be down, Moniepoint will always be stable. The problem is not the legacy infrastructure nor the bank, but rather the engineers building on the middleware for the bank. Banks need to invest heavily in very top-quality engineers. So, if you hate GTBank and still use Moniepoint, just know that you are still using GTBank under another name.”
Debunking the claim via the same channel, Moniepoint said:
- “Hello Alex, Moniepoint’s infrastructure isn’t layered on any bank, but on our CBA built by engineers in-house with a hybrid cloud architecture. While collaborations happen in the financial services space and are important, incorrect assertions aren’t good for anyone.”
What experts are saying
People with knowledge of the banking system and engineering also disagree with Alex on the assertion noting that it would have been impossible for Moniepoint to offer seamless services if its transactions are being routed through GTBank, which is one of the traditional banks witnessing pressure on their systems.
Indeed, according to them, the experience during the recent cash scarcity would also prove otherwise, as Moniepoint was one of the fintechs whose platforms became the saving grace for many Nigerians while all traditional banks, including GTBank, were suffering glitches due to an increase in online transactions.
An engineer in the industry, Mr. Adewale Adeoye, noted that the Educare CEO might have interpreted the information he got about the relationship between the fintech and the bank wrongly because it is not possible for Moniepoint to layer on GTBank’s infrastructure and continue to deliver seamless service while GTBank is having issues with its network.
- “The fact is that all fintechs do not have license to carry out settlement. This presupposes that they will have to partner with commercial banks in this regard. This is different from layering infrastructure on a bank. If that was the case, Moniepoint’s customers would be having the same issue as GTBank’s,” he said.
A software engineer, Mr Victor Bala, also argued that the relationship between Microfinance Banks and Deposit Money Banks does not necessarily translate to infrastructure layering.
- “There is a correspondence banking between Microfinance Banks and Deposit Money Banks, but that doesn’t mean their infrastructure has to be layered on the DMB infrastructure nor having that much percentage of transactions go through the DMB. They can carry out internal and as well as use other channels for transactions,” he said.