LAGOS Archives

January 22, 2022

DPO offers merchant aggregation services to over 60,000 active merchants, including eCommerce companies, airlines and travel agents

LAGOS, Nigeria, January 21, 2022/ — One Payment Limited, a subsidiary of the leading Pan-African digital payments group, DPO Group (https://DPOGroup.com) has been granted a license by the Central Bank of Nigeria to provide certain types of payments services to businesses across Nigeria.

This license enables the DPO Group to operate as an independent payment solutions services company in Nigeria as it does across over 20 other countries in Africa. DPO offers merchant aggregation services to over 60,000 active merchants, including eCommerce companies, airlines and travel agents.

Local and global businesses trust DPO Group because its robust and reliable network allows merchants to accept payments in the currency of their choice. Working across local and international channels, DPO also offers strong protection against fraud and helps merchants manage refunds, chargebacks and more.

eCommerce has seen significant growth in Nigeria in recent years, due to high levels of internet penetration combined with being one of the largest digital economies on the continent. Digital payments make up the large majority of payment volumes in the country, and volumes are expected to reach 7.7bn by 2025, representing a growth of 45% from 2019. [1]

Eran Feinstein, CEO of DPO Group, commented, “Nigeria represents a key market for any business with a digital focus, as one of the most innovative African countries when it comes to fintech and eCommerce. This new license is an exciting development which will allow us to offer an even smoother payment process for Nigerian businesses looking to grow and reach more customers through secure digital payments.”

DPO Group was acquired by Network International in 2021 in a landmark deal for the African payments space. It continues to operate under the same brand in existing territories, and will be launching a new comprehensive payment solution, ‘DPO Pay’ for businesses across Africa and other territories.

DPO’s country manager in Nigeria – Chidinma Aroyewun said, “This license provides an exciting opportunity for us at DPO. It allows us to work with tens of thousands of Nigerian businesses and help them achieve their growth goals through secure payment technology.”

January 19, 2022

Periculum helps its banking and lending customers identify fraud risk, assess creditworthiness, and analyze existing data

LAGOS, Nigeria, January 17, 2022 — The availability of domestic credit is a key requirement for consistent economic growth in developing countries. The vitality of financial services such as banking, savings, debt and equity financing, investment management, and point-of-sale lending is largely dependent on the maturity of its domestic credit industry. Nigeria’s domestic credit market pales in comparison to similar countries of the same size. For context, credit to the private sector in Nigeria is about 12 percent of GDP, lower than South Africa’s 129 percent and Malaysia’s 134 percent. High ratios of credit to the private sector in these countries have helped to ramp up real sector growth, create innovative innovation possibilities for technology-enabled businesses, accelerate financial development, ensure the efficient functioning of the economy and guarantee the prosperity of the private sector.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and other development partners including the Bank of Industry (BoI), the Bank of Agriculture (BoA), among others have embarked on significant credit injections to support the critical sectors of the economy, but the paucity of credit assessment infrastructure ensures many potential borrowers are denied access to loans, and when they do, they can be charged as much as triple the base interest rate. This financial exclusion has significant outcomes for the real sector as lack of access to credit can be a disincentive to entrepreneurship, investment, and economic growth.

Canadian fintech startup and credit assessment company, Periculum, has launched in Nigeria to tackle the challenge of domestic credit to the underserved markets. Focused on improving financial inclusion in emerging markets through automated credit assessment tools that close the consumer credit gap and help financial institutions provide credit facilities to the financially excluded while making smarter decisions, Periculum officially launched its financial service product offerings at a media interaction today.

Speaking at the launch, Michael Temitope Collins, Periculum’s founder and Chief Executive Officer, said “Africa needs domestic credit to stimulate real economic growth. And this is not only bank-to-business credit; it can also be digital lending for short-term credit as well as “buy now, pay later” schemes. The absence of tech-enabled credit assessment infrastructure has limited the quality and quantity of lending and may be behind the risk premiums borrowers have to pay, and the harassment practiced by predatory lenders in countries like Nigeria. Periculum will change that. We are a top provider of data analytics and credit assessment services targeted explicitly to underserved markets. We help our customers to reduce their lengthy loan application processing times and loan default rates and offer loans to the underbanked and unbanked consumers as well as micro, small and medium-scale enterprises. With reliable, tech-enabled, credit assessment services, financial institutions can increase lending to those that need credit.”

The company has also announced the appointment of a Managing Director, Damilola Aluede, to accelerate its business in Nigeria.

Founded in 2019, Periculum helps its banking and lending customers identify fraud risk, assess creditworthiness, and analyze existing data. Periculum offers real-time decision-making, analysis, and credit underwriting solutions to financial institutions including banks, non-banking financial companies, and fintech companies. By providing information on the financial worthiness of customers and automating the loan decision process, Periculum’s customers can gather and analyze borrower information and assign a credit score faster, with real outcomes on financial inclusion in Nigeria and other markets.

https://www.periculum.io/media/

Periculum offers data aggregation APIs and platform solutions that aggregate data from partners including open banking APIs and the credit bureaus, to provide complete financial and data profiles of prospective borrowers and third-party entities. Some of its clients include Fundii, Lendaba, Sycamore, Golden Ox Partners, Vola Africa and Venero.

On its product roadmap and current services, Collins added “We offer services that include Credit model development, SMS data aggregation and analysis, financial data analysis, and other data analytic solutions. We can help our customers with solutions such as fraud detection, insights for lenders based on customer segmentation and customer lifecycle value, insights to retailers and ATM operators, and several other benefits”.

The startup was accepted into Techstars in 2021 and is among the 2021 Techstars Montréal AI cohort, as well as the Founder Institutes’ Select Portfolio. In October 2021, Periculum raised a $620,000 pre-seed funding round to help it expand its team, improve product development and scale its operations in Nigeria and other markets. The company currently delivers services to customers in Canada and Nigeria and plans to expand to Ghana, Kenya, and Egypt before the end of 2022.

For many countries in Africa, there is still a financial divide. By tackling the credit assessment challenge, Periculum can build the financial infrastructure that helps in addressing the issue of access to financial services and improves development outcomes for millions of people, with better opportunities for businesses, financial institutions, and lenders.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Periculum.

December 21, 2021

The event included insight from global market intelligence and advisory service, IDC, as well as a panel of industry thought leaders

LAGOS, Nigeria, December 9, 2021/ — Attendees at Clickatell’s (www.Clickatell.com) Connect Interact and Transact (CIT) annual event last week experienced how creating a world where commerce and communications collide is where brands may do their best work for their customers. The event included insight from global market intelligence and advisory service, IDC, as well as a panel of industry thought leaders.

Titled “Turning Conversations into Commerce”, the event was hosted virtually for Clickatell’s growing list of Nigerian and other African clients and once again was moderated by Hannes van Rensburg, Clickatell’s Chief Commercial Officer.

Before he introduced the keynote speaker, van Rensburg set the scene by reminding attendees that customer service began in branches more than 100 years ago before it evolved to include call centers, our laptops, and then mobile apps.

“Consumers are spending more and more time engaging with one another on chat platforms without the frustration of long wait times, long hold times, and long download times. This convenience is what the Chat Commerce revolution is all about,” van Rensburg explained.

Jon Tullett, Senior Research Manager, Cloud/IT Services, IDC South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, kicked off his keynote titled “More omni, less channel – The future of customer interaction is your business”, by echoing van Rensburg’s thoughts on how rapid digital maturation has forever changed how we engage with brands.

“The traditional notion of omnichannel is changing. A channel brings customers to you. More and more it’s about doing business with your customers where they are in that moment. In the future, this will evolve into anticipating where they will be and engaging with them there,” he explained.

Tullett said the region had seen a tremendous amount of investment in digital fulfillment as companies rushed to get online during lockdowns. However, he warned that there was still some way to go in terms of the development of the behind-the-scenes customer service journey and integrated supply chain efforts required by a digitally mature market.

“Customers are growing up faster. They expect a global e-commerce experience because that’s who they are doing business with. They expect a retail experience that looks and feels like Amazon or GoDaddy. They expect to be able to reach brands through whichever channel they choose with complete privacy and compliance,” he warns.

Tullett went on to look at how today’s customers demand simplicity, but that delivering on this demand can be a complex task for organizations. He also shared five stages of customer experience, helping attendees understand the IDC MaturityScape and what customers expected at each stage.

Ending his presentation, Tullett shared some of IDC’s Worldwide Future of Customer and Consumer Predictions for 2022, which included:

● By 2023, 25% of global banks will use AI-based sentiment analysis to improve customer experience.

● In the same timeframe, 25% of companies will offer tracking transparency for customer complaints. This will be so successful that by 2025 this number will rise to 75% of global companies.

● By 2026, AI interactions and analytics will deliver deeply personalized journey engagement, eliminating up to 40% of marketing and sales human touchpoints in B2B interactions.

Pieter de Villiers, Co-Founder and CEO at Clickatell, opened the panel discussion, giving his views on how the chat revolution will evolve over the coming years:

“Every brand has had to find new ways of reaching their customers, especially in the last two years during the global Covid pandemic. Looking ahead, every digital interaction between a brand and its customer provides a learning opportunity to make the experience exponentially better. Along with the advancements in AI, we will see Chat Commerce evolve into personalized commerce, and we believe our chat offering will be the bridge to help companies reach that next level of engagement,” he explained.

Daniela Birnbaum, Channel Partner Manager at WhatsApp EMEA, shared how WhatsApp was ideally suited to support businesses in the customer journey.

“WhatsApp is a platform used by businesses to drive sales and for customer care. It is used through the entire customer journey including pre-sales and even in some loyalty programs,” she said, adding that its reliability and end-to-end encryption made it more secure than traditional channels when it came to financial transactions.

Well-known West African business personality, Austin Okere, Founder of CWG PLC and Ausso Leadership Academy, also shared some insights.

“Rapid technological adoption has meant we are now seeing things we thought impossible. I recently opened a bank account in Ghana by simply providing my Ghanaian ID card. All the other necessary information resides in a shared database, doing away with the piles of documents we would normally have to provide. Banks have stayed the same, but banking has changed, and the opportunity offered by WhatsApp in this regard is unimaginable,” he shared.

Adding his own prediction, de Villiers summed up the conversation saying: “We see a move away from chat self-serve to full Chat Commerce in 2022. The only question that remains is to see if brands can trust the channel and scale and are able to leverage what it can bring to their customers.”

Clickatell’s West Africa Director, Samson Isa and host of the event closed proceedings saying he was looking forward to seeing brands connect, interact, and transact with their customers, through chat, with the same ease as they do with their friends and family.

To download a recording of the CIT 2021 virtual event, click here (https://bit.ly/3pEEQcG). For more information on how Chat Commerce can help your business connect with your customers visit www.Clickatell.com.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Clickatell.

DPO Group granted regulatory license to provide payments services in Nigeria

Canadian fintech Periculum, officially launches in Nigeria, set to build credit assessment infrastructure for Africa

Clickatell’s Annual CIT Event Addresses How Chat for Customer Experience is Taking the World by Storm