AI-Driven Islamic Microfinance in West Africa
Founded: 2014
Headquarters: Freetown, Sierra Leone
Industry: ICT, Finance
A leading telecommunications provider in West Africa, recognized for deploying high-speed fiber connectivity across the region, identified a strategic opportunity to extend its services beyond digital infrastructure. With an extensive network and a substantial consumer base, the organization sought to transform into a financial technology enabler, using AI-driven solutions to promote inclusive economic growth and expand digital financial access.
In 2023, the provider initiated a digital transformation to launch a unified financial services platform, leveraging its existing customer base to deliver advanced, AI-powered banking capabilities.
By adopting Finpace, an intelligent digital banking core, the organization established a scalable ecosystem that bridges traditional banking, mobile money, and card-based payments. This approach positioned the company to drive financial inclusion, enhance customer engagement, and unlock new revenue streams across West Africa.
The challenge: building an integrated super app in a fragmented market
The vision was to develop a comprehensive financial platform capable of consolidating all aspects of users’ financial lives into a single interface. Fragmentation in the regional financial landscape created multiple challenges requiring a technology-first solution.
First, the platform needed to integrate formal banking with informal mobile money ecosystems. Users required seamless connections to regional banks while simultaneously accessing mobile money services through USSD and digital channels, ensuring inclusivity for populations with limited internet access.
Second, the system had to support global payments through secure virtual and physical cards, enabling multi-currency transactions for both domestic and international commerce. Strategic partnerships with card issuers were critical to ensure instant card issuance and compliance with financial regulations.
Finally, the platform needed to unify essential payments, including utility bills, mobile top-ups, and government services, into a frictionless, intuitive experience for all users, maximizing adoption and engagement.
"Partnering with Finpace allowed us to transform our financial services into a fully intelligent, AI-driven platform. The solution reduced operational complexity, enhanced user engagement, and delivered measurable growth in digital financial inclusion across the region." — Amina Koroma, CPO
The solution: Finpace AI-powered digital banking core
Finpace implemented a scalable digital wallet infrastructure designed specifically for the African market, embedding advanced AI and machine learning capabilities into the transaction engine.
1. Seamless integration. The platform connected traditional banks in real time while supporting USSD-based mobile money transactions, bridging the gap between banked and underbanked populations. This dual-integration model ensured secure, instant processing across all transaction types.
2. Intelligent security and compliance. Finpace’s AI algorithms provide continuous transaction monitoring and predictive fraud detection, protecting multi-currency wallets and reducing exposure to financial crime. The intelligent core also ensures regulatory compliance while enabling operational scalability.
3. Payments and Personalization. The platform supports instant issuance and management of virtual and physical cards for secure global transactions. AI-driven predictive analytics analyzes transaction patterns to provide personalized financial insights, optimize spending, and intelligently route payments for maximum efficiency, enhancing the overall user experience.
The impact
By leveraging the intelligent digital banking technology provided by Finpace, the provider achieved a transformative milestone in Sierra Leone’s digital financial landscape. The platform immediately provided expanded financial accessibility, enabling seamless integration of banking, mobile money, and card-based transactions, which rapidly increased the financial reach to both banked and unbanked populations across the country.
This resulted in enhanced user engagement because the Finpace-powered architecture delivered a frictionless, all-in-one Super App experience, driving high user adoption and retention by consolidating diverse financial needs into a single application. Crucially, the integration of AI-driven fraud detection ensured a robust, AI-optimized security framework, creating a highly secure and regulatory-compliant financial ecosystem that proactively mitigates risk and builds essential user trust in digital services.
Ultimately, the unified financial platform achieved significant operational efficiency gains, optimizing transaction processing and automating back-office operations, which reduced manual interventions and enhanced service delivery across all payment types. The provider’s deployment of the Finpace intelligent platform is thus redefining digital banking in West Africa, empowering users, accelerating economic participation, and setting a crucial benchmark for the future of FinTech across the continent.
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