Transactions: Extract Value from Financial Data

Is data truly the new oil? Let's find out!
The internet revolution has given birth to many technology-based companies and demonstrated the importance of data. Today's tech giants like Google, Facebook, and others, are riding and striving on consumer data to make informed decisions and improve the quality of services they render. With the onset of open banking, we have also seen various institutions embrace the efficacy of financial data (with users' consent).

Although the accessibility to consumers' financial data is necessary to make pre-informed decisions and build awesome products, connectivity to raw data alone does not present much value. As a result, businesses need a blend of secure, standardized, and excellent developer experience platforms to pull insights from financial data in a seamless and automated way.

That's where Okra Transactions comes in handy.

What problems does Transactions API solve?

When money is transferred between different entities, transaction data is created. Transaction means different things to the recipient and the sender. For example, a subscription to Netflix is an expense to the user and revenue to Netflix. Similar transactions can occur daily, such as bill payments for internet service, fuel, etc. Unfortunately, many financial institutions freely include confusing descriptions and make it challenging to extract insights from transactions properly.

An example of a transaction description from an institution:

As you can see, raw transaction data often contains lengthy, complex sentences and a plethora of statistics with little context — effectively rendering a valuable amount of the data meaningless. If you can't understand it, you can't use it.

Okra’s Transactions API addresses this issue by automatically cleaning and refining financial data. As a result, you receive standardized data that you can utilize right away rather than a cluster of unorganized data.

Okra’s Solution - Transactions API

With Okra’s Transactions API, you can access real-time customer transaction data (with consent)from more than 100 banks in Nigeria.

The data retrieved is unified and cleaned up to easily power your fintech needs. The Transactions API, categorizes customer account data, balances, and transaction data in an easy-to-understand manner.

Who can benefit from Okra Transactions?

Transactions API serves businesses across several industries, including;

• Lending
  Preview users' transactions to match users with sustainable loans in real-time and lower your default rates.
• Personal finance
  Build tailored finance management experiences for each user with their financial information.
• Insurance
  Track user claims across multiple bank accounts and industries to optimize performance and prevent fraud.
• Financial management
  Use real-time data insights to scale your business budgeting and planning decisions.

What does this mean for end-users?

With Okra standardized transaction data, fintech can build wealth, lending, or finance management products that help end-users keep track of their expenditures and incomes, hence enabling them to make better budgeting plans and financial decisions.

How to get started

Transactions can be seamlessly integrated via various channels through the Okra widget, a client-side platform, or the API.

While integrating Transactions into your product, your customers are required to connect their bank account using their internet banking or mobile bank details during the authentication process. Okra fetches real-time, refined, and useful account data at a successful connection.

This plug-and-play process eliminates the hassle of data extraction, connections, and authentication, as that is taken care of for you, so you only need to focus on building great solutions.

Start building right away!

Check out our documentation to learn more about Transactions. Or, if you want to try it out for yourself, sign up for a free account to start building with the Okra today.

If you are passionate about open finance, you definitely should visit our website to see other services that might be appealing to you.

Contact sales or send an email to sales@okra.ng to get started!