How SystemSpecs became Nigeria’s software powerhouse
If we keep importing software in Nigeria, unemployment rate would increase. Crime would increase and the country would remain perpetually down. Yet, we have the skills. I believe we have to build Nigeria,” John Obaro, CEO/founder, SystemSpecs, said during an interactive radio programme in Lagos while revealing how he built the company from the scratch in 1992 into what has become – a software powerhouse.
The company offers electronic payment services to the Central Bank of Nigeria [CBN], Nigeria Inter Bank Settlement System plc (NIBSS) among other public and private organisations and individuals in Nigeria.
Speaking on “Winning in a Rapidly Evolving Industry,” an SME-focused radio programme sponsored by Fidelity Bank, Obaro, Nigeria’s IT Personality award winner-2013, went on memory lane, and talked about his years as an employee of UBA, Leventis and IMB in the 90s. “When we developed Remita, we were thinking of fraud. We knew the system would be opened to hackers.
Therefore, security was paramount on our plate. From a foreign perspective, it would not be an issue but for a Nigerian, it is an issue”. He told Martin Udogie, programme anchor, that the idea of SystemSpecs came while he worked at International Merchant Bank (IMB) where he spent seven years. He was comfortable at IMB but he believed he could do “something different.”
Meanwhile, during this era, majority of his colleagues were changing employment. As a manager at IMB then, there was nothing to prove on the job. That was when he called it quit to pursue his dreams.
According to him, during this period the fad was to move to another bank and earn jumbo salary. He however chose to leave certainty for uncertainty because, as he narrated, his salary was growing “but I was not growing”, and he would not want to spend the rest of his life “like that”. However, the second-generation banks were opening shop then and Obaro had different employment opportunities at his disposal.
One of his bosses then attempted to convince him, saying it would have been easy and more rewarding for him to move on with one of the second-generation banks.
Had he stayed on, Obaro explained in retrospect, he would have been doing the same thing. Instead of that, “I decided to move on and have fun. Since then, I have had no regrets. God has been good to me. I have some good people”. He said some of the team members are still with the company. He said keeping the same team has been very helpful, as it has helped in building an institution to support what the company has.
He explained to the audience that the company has been able to move through the years despite different challenges. “I am happy with what I have. We brainstorm together. It is not enough to have a vision. You need a good execution team in place. Vision without execution is hallucination.
You need a team to execute the vision you have,” he said. Before a live audience, Obaro explained to Udogie how SystemSpecs was birthed. He said he and his small team had a mandate to replace the banking package for IMB.
Arthur Andersen were the project managers, the team was examining several banking applications, and the developers of Kapiti banking software were influenced to move to Nigeria at the time.
During the review process, he encountered a UK company, Systems Union, which developed one of the applications under review. According to him, Systems Union had accounting software and not banking software. However, Systems Union did not get the IMB job. However, contact with the company exposed him to what accounting software could do for organisations in Nigeria. That was when “I was interested in the company and its product”.
Based on the post-evaluation contact by the Systems Union team, he started ruminating on what he could do with them. Eventually, in 1992 after two years of contact, he left IMB to become the Systems Union’s representative in Nigeria and started pushing Sun Systems accounting software in Nigeria. He sold the software to oil and gas, and manufacturing companies among others. Having established presence with Systems Union in Nigeria, he moved to the next stage of what he could do locally.
He realised that Systems Union’s Sun Systems did not have provision to address the payroll challenges of customers and he believed this represented an opportunity. With this insight, he pulled his team together and developed a payroll package, which has now become human manager from its early days when it was called SpecPay.
The market acceptance of the payroll package was quite good and encouraging and the company increased in size. One of his former executive directors at IMB teased him years later that what he set out to do was to “build a small shop of not more than five people, or not more than 10 people.”
Certainly, that was his vision, Obaro said. As time went on, opportunities came and he had to reinforce his team. After HumanManager, the next big thing was the launch of Remita an integrated e-payments, e-invoicing, e-collections, e-payroll and e-schedules platform.
In addition to the CBN, Remita is today in use across all commercial banks and by over 400 microfinance banks in Nigeria moving over N500bn worth of transactions every month. From humble beginnings based on one man’s vision, SystemSpecs has today become not just Nigeria’s flagship software house but a national asset owned and managed 100 percent by multidisciplinary talented Nigerians.
Ben Uzor