Tayo Oviosu: A success story against all odds

A few years ago, a young man with big dreams got fed up with erratic Automated Teller Machines and long queues in banking halls that he decided to step up to the challenge and do something about the situation.

After a thirteen year career run in the United States and South Africa, which included working at Delloitte Consulting and Cisco Systems, he packed his bags got on a plane and came home in search of his nirvana.

Three months later, he had a light bulb moment and Paga Tech was born.

With his company running about fifteen transactions a minute, acing 1.6 million active users and processing about N6 billion over a period; Oviosu is finally doing something right.

However before the break came, he had to scourge his palms to stay afloat.

It’s a rag to riches story and he tells it really well.

Soon after Tayo got the opportunity to school at the University of South Carolina, he was forced to mop floors in order to put food on the table.

According to him, “My classmates [at the University of Southern California] used to see me mopping the floor and I sold coca cola with popcorn in a small case I would tie around my neck at American football games. I worked five jobs for the first two years and then in my third year, I was very fortunate to get a job at Shell which I stuck with while tutoring high-school students’ maths on the side.”

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He continued, “Even though I was doing these things, I was just there to build myself and career and go after a bigger dream and I it never let that dampen my mood. It was an interesting period in my life but I’m excited about the path I chose.

“I was 32 when I started Paga and these experiences had helped me form the business.  I think those things built my character and will,” he said.

In trying to find his niche, the 2013 CNBC/All Business Leaders Entrepreneur of the Year sampled a wide range of options. Some chauvinistically mundane, others intellectually bespoke.

“I did a lot of different things,” he says, “I looked at selling women’s hair and some of the other things I actually considered doing then are things that we have started doing in the current business such as the savings account and ways to bank the unbanked…right now we are doing Paga Savings which was one of the twenty ideas I wrote while searching for a business to go into.”

Since taking the plunge, the young CEO has been faced with the reality of running an enterprise in a frontier-market like Nigeria and he has come to one conclusion – it is a hard journey.

From sourcing for capital for to push his business forward to finding and retaining great talent its has been a one big hurdle after the other the other.

But ultimately, the one thing he can’t seem to wrap his mind around is the lackadaisical approach to commerce in this country.

In his words, “I have operated in the United States and South Africa and now, here in Nigeria and I have discovered that there is something extra difficult about doing business in Nigeria.

“It’s hard to explain but there’s something that makes things extra difficult here on various levels and it has nothing to do with government because the focus is actually on the private sector. It’s the time it takes to get a deal done and the kind of follow-up you have to do to get that deal to go through [that is the problem in this part of the world,” he expressed.

With the emergence of other payment platforms offering the same services as Paga, competition for market has been stiff, in spite of this Tayo is not willing to trade his position as an industry leader.

Rather he is focused on employing all his resources to staying relevant and increasing Paga Tech’s economic footprint.

According to him, “I don’t think anyone of my competitors thinks it’s a slam-dunk that they are going to win; we would be foolish to think that ourselves. We have to solve payments, and we want to be in the flow of as many transactions as possible while we take a humble percentage in profit.”

Sharing nuggets for occupational success, Oviosu, a strong believer in fairness and equity, lays emphasis on the importance of hard work. He believes in people building their skill set and developing their capacity to function efficiently. And instead of engaging in speculative job migrations so often, he’d rather “you stay focused on that job because if you don’t do a great job for the person that you are working for, it will come back to haunt you.”

With cyber-crime on the rise, Tayo is certain that, “If it’s quick money, there is something wrong.”

He is also sure that passion “is the only thing that is going to get you through the tough moments and there will be a lot of tough moments.”

As analysts predict hard seasons for indigenous businesses owing to spiking consumer price indexes and the devaluation of the local currency against the dollar, pundits certainly hope that the victories of budding corporations like Paga can stand the test of time.

RITA OHAI