More business owners are looking for tools to ease their operations and become more efficient and profitable. The primary areas of concern for many of these entrepreneurs seeking these tools are mostly opening a business account, facilitating business activities, and properly managing their finances.
And, these are the problems many fintech platforms are claiming to solve.
In this review, we will look at the Prospa app, another fintech platform that claims to provide business owners with all of the resources required to start, grow and track their businesses all in one app.
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About the Prospa App
The Prospa app was officially launched in 2019 to provide banking and business management tools to make business management easier for MSMEs business owners.
Because of its unique name, the app was easy to find on the Play Store (total size is 26MB- quite significant for a small business owner in Nigeria by the way). It requires Android 6.0 or higher to function.
At the time of writing, the app has received over 100,000+ downloads since launch, according to PlayStore.
The Prospa app provides the following services: bank account opening (corporate account), creating business invoices, creating sub-accounts for team members to manage your account, and sending as well as receiving payments.
Here is a bit of deep dive into the app’s design, ease of use, features and services provided, as well as some feedback from other users that you may find useful.
Getting started
When you launch the app, the first thing that appears is a list of ‘testimonies’ from BBNaija celebrities who are said to have used Prospa’s services. This is an excellent marketing strategy- as well as a short listing of some of their major features.
Creating an account seems like a child’s walk, especially if you have all of your personal information and the essential information for your ‘registered‘ business.
However, app verification might just be tough and can take a long time for an average user. It is particularly tougher for unregistered businesses or users without a CAC certification and other means of verification.
The truth is that many users may dump the app at this stage.
App design
The app’s background is dark blue and white. It also has a variety of bright colours for different highlights and icons
The taskbar has five pages: the landing page is named ‘Accounts’. It provides an overview of some of the app’s key features. The second page, titled ‘Payment,’ details all transaction processes.
The third page is labelled ‘Business,‘ which appears to be the most important section of all five pages because it contains almost all of the tools required to manage a business. The fourth page is called ‘Invoice‘. It helps with the creation and management of all invoice procedures.
The last page is for requesting both virtual and physical cards.
Ease of use
The app seems to be well-labelled, with a brief description and an image icon for each function. Despite these, it can still be challenging to navigate through a very large number of subsections at each click. The average user might be confused about navigation with the numerous sub-segment.
Read Also: E-payment transactions grow by 40% to ₦205.4trn in H1 2022- NIBSS report
Prospa’s offering
Sub-accounts
The Sub-account feature is one of the most intriguing aspects of the Prospa app.
This feature enables business owners to create an unlimited number of internal accounts with different account numbers such as salary, tax, and so on under the umbrella of the primary bank account. Its purpose is to make financial management easier.
Virtual Cards
Another exciting feature is the virtual and physical cards.
The virtual cards are used for online purchases, whereas the physical cards are used for business operational expenses. Except for the black-coloured cards, the cards are free and custom designed. According to the platform, physical cards can also be used for POS and ATM transactions.
Inventory tools
With so many unique business management tools, the app appears to be living up to its goal. It keeps track of cash sales, expenses, and business suppliers, employees, and customers. Users can set revenue targets, create budgets, automate payment, and use a bookkeeper tool.
The Prospa App also allows you to generate your Account statements with ease.
POS devices
Business owners can also have POS machines delivered to them, and physical cards work well with them.
The operators of the Prospa App promise that the POS device costs 50,000 naira and can be delivered to the user’s location. It is possible to pay for it in instalments or in full. To pay in instalments, you need to deposit a minimum of 50% upfront and pay the remaining 50% within 30 days.
Upgrade plans
To use most features on the app, users (small and growing teams) must upgrade to either a growth plan of 17,000 per month or a scale plan of 65,000 per month. Because the free version was designed for individuals only.
Safety and Security
The Prospa App has a two-factor authentication feature, fingerprint ID as well as a time-based password for users.
The platform also claims to encrypt its database and uploaded images. Only registered Nigerian businesses can be approved
Users’ feedback
We gleaned some feedback of users on Twitter. Here are a few to consider:
In all
For us, social media was our first port of consult for this app, and there have been a lot of queries on its Twitter accounts, which can be a total turn-off for potential users.
Furthermore, the app only has one banking option (Wema), which may not be acceptable especially as people are wary of doing business with just any bank.
Some of the platform’s key features, such as ‘cards,’ are still unavailable. And, the platform claims to create web stores for only registered and approved businesses and also grants loans to these groups of individuals and upgraded members based on their activity with the platform’s services.
For the purpose of this review, I used the demo account as an unregistered business to navigate the app, although there were some limitations.
N.B: I contacted platform team members to get their thoughts on some of my observations on the app but I received no response.
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