The e-hailing business in Nigeria received a boost recently when T-bobo, a new e-hailing company, launched ZoomRyders into the market to bridge identified gaps and offer pleasant riding experience.
Another major reason for coming into the market, according to T-bobo officials, is safety in the e-hailing business which, they note, is taken for granted at the moment.
“T-bobo has come to bridge the gap, to ensure the safety of riders. We have come also to help the stakeholders (drivers) who are going to be working for us,” Sanya Falusi, an official of the company, assured at the launch of ZoomRyders in Lagos.
Falusi who represented Olatunde Balogun, T-bobo’s MD/CEO, explained that their emphasis on safety was to build confidence in people who would be using their services for their transportation needs.
“Safety is a global issue; so we want to ensure that while riding with us, a customer, to a large extent, feels safe,” he said, disclosing that all their vehicles would have cameras installed so that, at any point in time, their riders are monitored for safety purposes.
Besides the cameras, Falusi said they would also ensure a hitch-free experience for riders by making sure that drivers have clean driving licence, adding that they would be using an organization to screen all their drivers to ensure they do not have police records, and that their cars are in good condition.
“Once we get them on board, we are going to have inspection centers for their vehicles; we are going to ensure that their cars are in good motorable conditions to avoid negative feedbacks,” he said.
Continuing, he revealed, “we are going to have inspection centres which were not in existence before; in Nigerian businesses, everyone is just thinking about profit and loss. We are not doing that; we are going to have inspection centres in places like Lekki, Agege, Surulere and other places.
“You will bring your car periodically to any of these locations, we will inspect it and ensure that it is top notch. These are measures we will put in place to reduce, to the barest minimum, the occurrence of breakdown and uncomfortable rides that a lot of people are experiencing now,” Falusi said.
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Though T-bobo is not coming to make a ride 10 Kobo per 5 kilometres, Falusi assured that they were going to be 10-20 percent cheaper than the existing charges, stressing that they had a comparative cost advantage.
ZoomRyders is yet in its pilot phase and is starting out in Lagos but, according to Falusi, there is an intention to move to other cities like Abuja, Ibadan, etc. “It’s a pilot scheme, but we intend to cover all the states of Nigeria and ensure that our services are top-notch,” he assured.
The T-bobo App is powered by Fidelity Bank and, according to Victor Umonwe, Head of digital payment at the bank, they will be replicating what obtains in other e-hailing companies like Bolt and Uber.
“If a rider gets on a ride, at the end of the journey, we will be able to debit the rider successfully. We are the ones in charge of powering that payment process and we will be doing that at the back end.
“We are here to add value to what T-bobo is putting in place. We are going to improve on the security. So we are also going to ensure that the payment architecture is well covered by introducing multiple payment channels,” Umonwe said.
He assured that they would not limit their options to card payment only, adding that, most likely, they would be introducing other payment options, such that a rider doesn’t need to expose his card details. “After the ride, we can actually send an account number which you can pay into,” he said.
He said that they would be introducing what he called the ‘recurring payment’ option which is one in which a rider’s card is linked to the app so that when he is on a ride, he doesn’t have to add his card details because the system automatically debits him.
“I am not sure that account payment option is out there today in Bolt or Uber. So, we are going to introduce that account payment option. What that offers is efficiency in terms of success rate. I can confidently say we have up to 99 percent success,” he noted.
