The influx of technology has brought on its wake a ‘viciously selfish war’ that has promoted competition rather than collaboration, experts in the country’s tech ecosystem have said.
The experts who spoke at the First Edition of the Nigerian-British Chamber for Commerce (NBCC) Next Generation series themed ‘Pacemakers in the Tech Sector” said technology is a key disruptor across sectors of the economy.
According to them, it transcends the financial sectors across borders and continents and plays an important role in the promotion and current roll out of financial services that are aptly giving traditional institutions a stiff competition.
“Technology before was collaborative but now less of that and more competitive. Technology has enabled a high level of collaboration that the world had not seen before but the most important thing at the end of the day is that it is still a competition,” said Collins Onuegbu, founder and executive vice chairman, Signal Alliance .
“Someone wants to win and they are ready to do that. People have to make profit and wealth first. It is first a competition, but you need to collaborate. At the same time you do not want to collaborate at your own loss.”
CEO of Autocheck Africa Elop warns that “if something is not done to level the playing field in the tech sector, there is going to be a mess in the nearest future and this is where regulation comes in.”
To ensure that players in the sector maximize the presence of one another to drive the much needed goals of businesses and companies, the notion of ‘co-optition’ was advanced by Solape Akinpelu, the CEO of HerVest.
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She defines this term as, “A situation where there is collaboration but also competition for that tech space to get the larger share of market value.”
She also recognize that a lack of agility and nimbleness in many industries today who adopt technology in their processes may have contributed to the increased detachment and competition in the tech space.
“The funding between local investors and international investors is like day and night. We need agile systems, we need nimbleness.” She says.
Nevertheless, technology is identified as a key phenomenon in the way we live today.
Recently, Flutterwave became the biggest unicorn and most valuable company to come out of Africa with a $3 billion valuation on the conclusion of a fresh $250 million Series D round of funding and Adetayo Bamiduro, CEO/co-founder, MAX Africa said it is a big encouragement.
“Technology is fundamental for business. Without it you cannot scale.”
Max is expanding also both geographically and also across other parts of the mobility value chain. So whether it is electric vehicles, cars, or delivering insurance services to commercial drivers, we are expanding. The vision is there to build a massive company.”
He also says that “technology is disrupting the way we live. It is enabling distribution of goods and services on a very large scale and reducing cost. With the use of the smartphone now one can carry out services without visiting the physical stores. Also the requirements for the setting up of banks have changed. There is a merging of large tasks into simple processes and efficiencies are increasing.”
The revolution that technology brings on its strides nonetheless, a challenge for Nigeria was noted to be the adoption of the right infrastructure to enable the possibilities and services and remove challenges that previously existed for Nigerian companies and businesses.
“Talking about experiential products and customer offering across services for humans and users, the challenge previously was with personalization but with tech, that challenge is removed. Tech has simplified that using big data that tracks previous usage of customers and products can be built around,” Akinpelu said.
For valuation of businesses by potential investors and the eventual investments into the sector, a key consideration for value creation was identified as a major attraction.
“For funding, the important thing is finding companies that have a high potential to create value. And that is the basic thing that drives valuation. Technology allows us to identify problems and solve them.
The country’s challenges prepare people for that whether as an individual or business. We are in a situation where there are limited opportunities, technology becomes an enabler and puts individuals and firms at advantage where the traditional customers of the economy might not have insights into these opportunities. So it gives leverage to be able to scale that for businesses.”
“Fintech relies on the existing infrastructure especially in payment and banking. Banking infrastructure has been built over the last 2oo years and businesses still leverage that to go into transactions that the business infrastructure has already started. In Fintech, there is a lot of investment already made in setting up the infrastructure that drives it and what you then find is that a lot of fintech are going to relatively common problems that have existence within the business space or financial solution space.” Elop Ikpe expounded.
The potential in tech companies was identified as also key for valuation. Adetayo says that “When you think about value creation, you are not just thinking about the company’s capacity to generate revenue, you are also thinking about strategic capability. I can be totally valuable to person A and meaningless to person B. More of value creation is about capability.
MTN is delving into financial services and changing the whole company structure, but all of that is leveraging the capability of its build in terms of data infrastructure, technology infrastructure, and their distribution network across the continent and that is still in the works.”
The Founder and Executive Vice Chairman of Signal Alliance Collins Onuegbu expressed concerns that Nigeria is at the lowest ebb in the democratization of technology and investments relative to more developed nations of the world. “The world is evolving to the point where tech companies are looking internationally for international returns and because of that it has to happen everywhere and technology has been democratized everywhere. We in Nigeria are at the bottom of the pyramid in terms of Angel investment.”
The biggest tech companies in the world in terms of evaluation – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM) are massive data storage companies: On the logical sequence of data and infrastructure, Adetayo thinks that the advantage lies with “Building the technology platform rather than the database.”
However, the importance of data in today’s technological age was re-emphasized.
“With the amount of data that is being collected today, services need more and more data from selling points. We have to build more and more data centers. For example Google has built data centers around the world. What is happening in Nigeria is local centers.” Collins says.
On the quality and velocity of talents the dearth of tech talents was identified as prevalent.
Elop Ikpe, CEO Autocheck Africa said: “The level of disruption that has been created by the tech sector has buoyed the demand for tech talents. Training is important for companies. Internship programs can help such that in 3-5 years young talents are ready. Companies should build their own model because they are at risk of having no one to support the massive infrastructure being built.”
“It goes beyond what companies can do but countries also create a strategic plan for talents. China, Japan, Singapore have one thing in common – they have invested in massive digital education.” CEO of Max Africa Adetayo admonished.
“We as a country in Nigeria have said that youths’ exposure to too much internet will hamper their social development. They have reduced the strategy. That is a national strategy. How do we make young people interested? If you have 20million young Nigerians that have the talents and skills. If the demand is for 5 million, you still have 15 million there. But if it is only 20,000 and you take 25,000. There is a deficit.”
“Nigeria has a massive employment and massive under-employment problem. In a bid to get out of poverty, talents get stuck with traditional systems. However, people will naturally drift towards areas that have been successful as the demand for development increases.” Elop Says.
Calls were made by Solape for the need for inspirational leaders and the democratization of empathy in the tech industry in Nigeria.
In all, good corporate governance, adherence to global standards and solid investor relations were noted as important for start-ups to thrive in the Nigerian environment. “In technology the business is driven by referrals. No business will succeed without good customer service. As a startup is exposed to global standards, they are exposed to corporate governance and behavioral standards in management.” Elop says.
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