Pngme opens Nairobi office expanding open banking technology to Kenyan partners.
We are excited to announce the opening of our Kenyan office as part of our expansion into East Africa. George Mosomi will be leading Pngme’s efforts based out of Nairobi. We sat down to discuss the future of financial services in East Africa and his view on how Pngme will shape the landscape.
George has over 10+ years of leadership experience in the technology space. He has previously founded and scaled pan-African fintech companies in the energy and health sectors. He joins Pngme after co-founding EOS Nairobi and Anyi Health where he led their technical development to advance blockchain and credit facility for primary healthcare. Before EOS Nairobi and Anyi Health, George worked for several companies to deliver programs targeting microeconomic development across Sub-Saharan Africa, South America and South-East Asia.
Can you give us a bit more background on yourself? What motivated you to become involved in the financial sector? What were the key or defining moments in your career?
Right from my early years, I always wondered what the key elements were for creating a self-sufficient society on our resource rich continent Africa. My moment of revelation came while completing my Master’s program — in order for the continent to achieve sustainable development goals, we must first tackle financial inclusion. Access to financial services is the first step to breaking the poverty cycle. Take for example a family that is too poor to afford a light bulb at home, the children cannot complete their studies effectively, leading to another generation that is unable to escape the cycle of poverty. With inclusive financial services, responsible lending can create opportunities that enable society to flourish .
How does Pngme differ from working at larger, more traditional financial institutions? What was it that attracted you to join?
I have always enjoyed the speed of decision making at smaller organisations, and there is inherent agility in moving towards meeting the customer at their need. At Pngme, I have found that we are able to see things from our customer’s perspective and adapt quickly in this fast paced technology environment that our industry is involved in.
What has been the biggest developments in the digital payments sphere in the past few years? What technologies have made a noticeable impact/difference?
The most significant impact for me was the deployment of simu ya jamii back in 2007 which allowed entrepreneurs to create a communications business quickly, filling the gap that was not sufficiently covered by telephone booths and the very expensive mobile phones at that time. As is the cycle with exponential growth of technology, this was also replaced when the market was covered by the more affordable Chinese phones resulting in a wide penetration of not only mobile coverage but also one of the most convenient money transfer services in the world, MPESA. In the last few years, the growth of open source collaboration and open APIs has seen the largest growth in cross platform interoperability. The movement towards making the technology accessible to the user and to the providers across multiple platforms is one of the most powerful tools to ensure that we reach the goals of financial inclusion through secure and reliable platforms.
What are the main hurdles towards financial inclusion in the region? The Kenyan Government has a high bar for financial inclusion, do you think that’s possible?
The largest hurdle towards financial inclusion remains the manual processing of personal data which creates gaps in verification of individuals, long lead times for processing and opportunities for identity theft. It is time for financial institutions to leverage technology such as e-KYC to move to branchless banking and have secure integrations across the sector.
What are the biggest barriers to banks and/or other financial institutions adopting technologies like open APIs?
During the 2000s we have seen the likes of MPESA quickly scaling and meeting the needs of the customers at the points of need. In the late 2010s, the mobile lending scaled quickly overtaking the existing banks by making it easy to access consumer loans. Financial institutions have been playing catchup to technology which makes it hard for them to maintain a consistent segment across the population. I believe that the larger institutions should be leading the way by creating easier ways for people to transact and access favourable loans.
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