Virtual Accounts for Businesses: 9PSB is enhancing customer experience, helping businesses scale

By Mohammed Akanni

 

These past few years, Nigerians have faced the most intense economic pressures than it has ever faced in recent times. Individuals, businesses and sectors across the economy continue to push past the hydra-headed inflation, by adopting more efficient ways to scale their businesses for sustainable operations.

With the current situation, customers and businesses alike are looking for ways to utilize resources for optimum results as much as it is within their power. Nigerians are increasingly becoming conservative as everyone now seeks to maximize their resources as they go about achieving their dreams daily.  Businesses that seek to succeed greatly at this time, need to prioritize the utmost needs of customers so that they are positioned as customer centric and forward-thinking.  Automation, improved customer experience, and faster workflows are a few ways to get started.

The business environment is fast-paced and highly competitive and businesses that are looking to scale must incorporate highly efficient payment systems with an excellent turn around time when closing a sale. One of such payment systems is Incorporating virtual accounts as a payment infrastructure that can make more seamless, the customer experience.

Virtual accounts, which are essentially digital bank accounts, can significantly enhance the customer experience by streamlining payments and providing more convenient options. They offer a familiar payment method (bank transfer) without the need for businesses to manually track payments or provide additional details, leading to quicker and more accurate transaction processing and reconciliation.

Interestingly, Virtual accounts are bank agnostic, and they allow businesses receive payments from customers via multiple sources. They are essentially automated account numbers that are uniquely generated for each customer for the transaction at hand. This payment model helps to facilitate payment collection for business owners in real time, and it also helps customers to make payments for products and services without any glitch whatsoever.

As it is with many other reports, the McKinsey Global Payments Reports of 2024 report confirms that Instant payments will continue to gain dominance over other payment methods, with real-time payments infrastructures being more preferred by both customers and businesses.

More than ever before, fintechs are providing the virtual accounts infrastructure for businesses because of mutually beneficial purposes for both the customers of these businesses. The advantages far outweigh any risks whatsoever. Businesses who have decided to operationalise the virtual accounts system will enjoy improved cash flow management, faster transaction times, simplified reconciliation, cost effectiveness, better control and visibility, and most importantly easy and secure transactions.

9 Payment Service Bank (9PSB) -- a financial technology company empowering Nigerian businesses across industries provides unique and simple solutions that can be easily operationalised for business owners. Having provided virtual account infrastructure to many businesses, 9PSB’s virtual accounts infrastructure is highly secure and offers to businesses quick payment solutions for the reduction of wait times and the increase of customer satisfaction.

With  relatively competitive pricing, Robust and scalable APIs, Instant Virtual Account generation, Instant Settlement of funds to collection account, Support for automated instant settlement to any Bank, Configurable expiry time for dynamic Virtual Accounts (up to 24 hours), 9PSB’s Virtual Account provides for Payment refund (to the sending account) when there is the need to, and a robust dashboard for transaction monitoring among other custom-made solutions.

Beyond 9PSB’s ability to provide innovative financial solutions, it continues to strengthen its role as a forward-thinking enabler of businesses, fintechs, and merchants by shaping the future in real-time through its innovative products.

Virtual accounts have come to stay and businesses that desire to stay ahead of the curve must find effective ways to operationalize such infrastructures to scale profitably.

 

Mohammed Akanni, Fintech Analyst writes from Lagos