‘Young Nigerians are coming up with incredible solutions for e-commerce’

E-commerce in Nigeria is worth over $60 billion, yet enormous challenges ambush this burgeoning industry and call for solutions to help stir Nigeria towards a path of sustainable and diversified economic development and growth. In this interview, Olaniyi Yusuf, country manager of Accenture delineates milestones covered and the road ahead. He spoke to Stephen Onyekwelu. Excerpts:

Please, tell us a little about yourself.

My name is Olaniyi Yusuf. I studied pretty much in Nigeria. I studied at the University of Ife, and graduated in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc) in Computer Science and Economics. The first five years of my working career was with JKK, a Nigerian technology based company, where I worked as a programmer, a database administrator and system admin person. One of my major projects was with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to implement a banking application for both the Lagos Headquarters and Ibadan branch of the CBN.

When I left JKK in 1995, I joined the consulting division of Arthur Andersen, which transformed to Andersen Consulting and then to Accenture. This September marks my 21st anniversary with Accenture. I joined Accenture as Andersen back then so that I can move from just doing pure technology to a mix of technology, process work, people issues and strategy. Technology, process, people and strategy are the four pillars you need to make a business transformation.

You might be wondering what has made me to stay this long in one employment. Well, a number of things, the kind of people we work with and in fact, Accenture is a combination of the best talent that you can get. The top five banks are our clients, the NNPCs of this world, the Shells, the Mobils. Others are MTN, Etisalat and several others. This means a lot of opportunities to solve complex problems.

The creation of the Interswitch as a switching system was done by Accenture. This includes the creation of the first out of branch ATM machines and I was the programme manager for that. So each time I see anybody using an ATM card today, I have a personal sense of fulfilment and that speaks to the mission of Accenture, which is to help improve the way we work and live.

Today, any transaction above $1 million in the Oil & Gas industry is processed on a platform developed, managed and maintained by Accenture. If you want to get a loan from any commercial bank in Nigeria, your credit report is processed by a company that Accenture helped mid-wife. So, my long stay in Accenture is based on this commitment to transform the way we live and work.

E-commerce has dramatically improved the way we live and work. What is the size of the e-commerce market in Nigeria?

My informed guess about the size of that market is that before the 2016 devaluation, the market was worth between $60 and $70 billion. But with devaluation, you reduce that by 20 or 30 percent. Konga, during the Black Friday, had a turnover of over N100 million in one day. So, that tells you about the size of the market. E-commerce is trading, enabled by technology.

What are some of the challenges the industry is facing?

We do not have high quality infrastructure in all 774 local government areas in Nigeria. What that means is that the access and experience I will have in Lagos, someone in village may not have same. Yet, whether in Lagos or in my village, we all want to buy things and so we are just not scratching the potentialities of the market.

Electricity is also infrastructure, because without electricity you do not have Internet access. We do not have enough broadband penetration; we have less than six percent, which means very few people have Internet access. So, the availability and quality of Internet access remain a big challenge.

Beyond infrastructure, the other issue of course would be cyber security or the sphere of security and I will come to that shortly.  The other is inclusion, we are 180 million Nigerians and we have less than 60 million bank accounts, which means 120 million of us are financially excluded. In other climes, kids have bank accounts; their parents open such accounts for them and put their pocket money there.

A bigger question is of the 60 million account holders. How many of them have cards? Most payments are electronic, it is either you use your card or Internet banking to effect the transaction or make the transfer, or you use mobile payment platforms.

This limitation has made online malls to introduce payment on delivery, which in turn introduces additional costs and complexity into the dynamics. You could order some products, and when the e-commerce company comes to deliver but does not find the customer at home, what happens? Who will they deliver to? If you are at home and ordered, say eight items but decide you want to take only two, again what happens? So, we still have those issues of payment.

The other bigger issue is security and online theft. This has stopped quite a lot of people, especially the adults from using the services available via e-commerce platforms. They are afraid. I know a lot of elderly people who say to me, “I only write checks and do not make online payments because I do not want my account attacked. These are some of the constraints.”

I am encouraged by the young ones. They constitute the bulk of the potential. In fact Mark Zuckerberg’s recent visit to the tech-hub at Yaba, Lagos is a huge testimony to what is going on in the technology space. There is huge undergrowth of young Nigerians who are coming up with incredible solutions for e-commerce to address some of these constraints.

What solutions are in view?

In technology as in life, every problem is an opportunity. There are solutions that technology companies are working on. Take security, one of the things some companies are working on is basic education, educating people. If you put money in safe at home and locked it, you would not keep the keys on the centre table. Similarly, this applies to the way you guard your ATM card, too. The way you keep the keys to safe secured is also the way you should keep the PIN and password of you debit and credit cards secured. This education must extend to those in the rural areas.

The second solution is building systems that would prevent such cyber security breaches. One of them is authentication. Some of the authentication solutions we see now use biometric parameters such as fingerprints, facial and voice recognitions. This eliminates the need to remember your PIN and passwords, because that is part of the complexity.

However, if you are using your fingerprint, facial or voice recognitions, which are things that you have naturally with you and because biometrics are unique it is difficult for anyone to steal it. The smartphones that are coming now have inbuilt biometric systems and that would increase make e-commerce and Internet banking much more secured. One other possibility is to use multifactor authentication.

You are in addition to being a technology company, a strategy firm. What strategy advice would you give to firms during this period of economic recession?

The first thing to have in mind is that this is a tough period, but it will not be forever. Sooner than later, there will be a turnaround. If you have that mindset, you conserve energy, you conserve capital and reduce your costs and prepare for when things will turnaround.

For us at Accenture, we continue to invest in training, research and development, such that we are looking for opportunities that we can take to clients when things turnaround. This is indeed time to reduce cost. Things you can do with fewer people, you do and increase automation. If there are things that others can do, better outsource. If there are things you can partner with others to achieve, you do so. This is what the government will call Public, Private Partnership (PPP).

Part of cost cutting measures is to check whether there are assets you do not need or are underutilising. Those you do not need you sell off, those underutilised you find ways of optimising.  But you must continue to make investments in critical areas like training, research and development, so that you are well positioned to bounce back when the economy turns around. The question is not ‘if’, but ‘when’ will better times be upon us?

Stephen Onyekwelu