Nigeria Archives - Page 15 of 25

Is your bank there while you are on the move?

We are always on the move, not because we don’t have anything to do but that’s the reality of our lives in Lagos. We are usually busy, stuck in traffic and when our pretty backsides are stuck in traffic for hours, we end up loving our fondleslabs.

So while in that horrendous traffic, we want to get some things done such as reading the latest gist on Linda Ikeji or transferring money to a pesky cousin. Banking is what we all take seriously because that’s where your liquid livelihood is probably warehoused. We just wanna be able to hit our bank anytime and every time, any day and every day.

If banks understand this (they are supposed to be smart guys, ehn?) then I suppose they should have mobile first strategy. Ok, that’s consultants’ speak (heaven knows I hate that bunch!). The taste of the pudding is in the eating (whosoever came up with that proverb is a wobia!) so I expect that banks should have websites tuned for mobile phones. After all if I need to pay Silifa or find out some random thing about my bank and I’m stuck on Third Mainland Bridge traffic just around Oworo, it’s my unfortunate phone, battery and data permitting, that I will turn to.

So on an unfortunate Saturday while waiting for my friend to come around, I decided to visit banks’ websites with my phone and see how they scale up.
Here we go people:

Bank	Mobile Friendly	Secure Website
Access Bank	Yes	Yes
Citibank	Yes	No
Diamond Bank (*Acquired by Access Bank)	Yes	No
Ecobank Nigeria	No	No
Fidelity Bank Plc	Yes	Yes
First Bank of Nigeria	Yes	No
First City Monument Bank	No	Yes
Guaranty Trust Bank	Yes	No
Heritage Bank Limited	Yes	No
Keystone Bank Limited	Yes	No
Skye Bank	No	Yes
Stanbic IBTC Bank	Yes	No
Standard Chartered Bank	Yes	Yes
Sterling Bank	Yes	No
Union Bank of Nigeria	Yes	No
United Bank for Africa	No	No
Unity Bank Plc	Yes	No
Wema Bank	Yes	No
Zenith Bank	Yes	Yes

How did I test?

Used Samsung S5
Searched for the bank name and clicked on the link
Faffing about on April 4, 2015

What’s the secure website about?
It is increasingly common for websites to now default to using just HTTPS for all traffic. It is seen as a sign of understanding the times. However it doesn’t mean that internet banking traffic has been compromised (all banks use HTTPS for their internet banking).

Instant Recharge: The New Kid on the Block

Something interesting is happening in Nigeria but it’s so subtle you may not even notice it. Ma’am, I tore up the recharge voucher!

Ok, if your bank doesn’t allow you to buy airtime instantly from your phone maybe time you got another bank. Nope, seriously, I’m not doing a Diamond Bank skit.

I just finished reading “The best interface is no interface” and the first stuff that came to my mind was, we just did this s**t in Lagos! You can now top-up your phone instantly without scratching a single card.

A quick backgrounder. Some years ago, CBN got tired of banks just looking only for rich dudes and newly minted yahoo boys and so took them on a Cashless drive. Some bits worked and some failed. Mobile money was one of the failed bits. Damn, people just don’t like mobile money wallets. I didn’t like them either. They were islands, expensive to operate and just generally annoying. Meanwhile at the end of the experiments where bankers set fires to a lot of money, out of the ashes rose USSD codes.

Not knowing what to do with the damn thing, banks started slapping in some bits of code that allows you to buy airtime when you dialed say * 123 * amount #. It simply works! GTBank was the first to start, then Fidelity, then Zenith and before you could say Jack Robinson, other banks fell in. Today, Wema, First Bank and Sterling have joined the fray and before mid-year, without divulging confidential information, more than 10 banks will launch the service. I can predict that come January 1 next year, the only banks that won’t be offering this service would be headquartered in Sambisa Forest.

There are implications though and as usual it would be a double edge sword depending on which side of the damn sword you are on.

Let’s talk about the positives.
Customers would have an amazing time buying airtime. If you’ve experienced this service, you ain’t gonna touch a recharge card again. Neither would you login to your miserable Internet banking again.

Banks, I just love bankers! They now earn new revenue stream of between 4% to 6% depending on how they bargain with providers. Trust me, there would be bloodbath next year when contracts are renewed.

New services would ride on this. One day someone would figure out transferring funds instantly can also work on USSD. Same as cashless ATM withdrawal. Customer service may even evolve on it: you may be able to update your address, phone, email, etc. without visiting your bank.

Finally, even if we roasted our Mobile Money ideas, our simple but elegant USSD has worked. Let someone clap for CBN!

But the bad is scarier!
Recharge sellers are facing extinction. Everyone has phones and almost everyone has accounts. Once the banks have corralled their customers into this scheme, there goes the gravy train. Oops, obliteration isn’t awaiting only the recharge sellers but also the super dealers. Damn, I feel sorry for the lot.

Card networks (I didn’t mention names!) will feel the pinch. You want to know why? Because they make money off transactions but once banks figure out how to do same stuff over USSD without involving the card networks, say goodbye to money baby! After all, 95% of all transactions in Nigeria are local. In fact I feel the number is sexed up, it may be closer to 99% but then who cares?

NCC and CBN may bring further regulations into this. Regulations help and hurt at same time. Depends on where you find yourself, just like that damned swinging sword up some paragraphs above. At least I know of one standing regulation that says Banks cannot sell recharge directly and must go through a provider. Should that change, then…complete the sentence.

The market today is dominated by two major players, but I won’t mention names because I have friends there. If NCC tweaks the regulations both face the risk of disappearing as the telcos will simply talk to the banks and cut vending companies off at the knees. I’m sure the telcos are already noticing things.
In all, there are more gainers (customers and banks; about 30M of them lot) than losers (recharge sellers, super dealers, card networks, vending providers) so let the game starts. I’m up for innovation, I’m up for liberation and I’m up for a good sleep after a long travel.

See what a boring flight can make you type out. Pathetic.

MTN Nigeria made $2.6B Profit in 2014 – Beat that!

MTN Group just released their 2014 results. For once I sincerely believe I’m sure I’m in the wrong business. First thing on Monday, I’m taking a flight to Abuja to get my own telecoms license. You think I’m wrong? How can those numbers be wrong?

Ok, time to face realities.

MTN Nigeria had a bumper time last year. Forget about the pessimistic outlook splashed out on the annual report. Making $2.6B profit in a year na beanz? I tried to calculate that in Naira but my calculator displayed this result “Are you on cheap weed?” If I got that from Mallams, I would have to bring along, or say, freight along N590,534,092,350. How many alabaru can carry that?
Don’t even start me up on all the things you could do with that amount of money. But let’s try some:

I could send SMS to all Nigerians, the whole 170M of us, 868 times. What would I even say to them? At 160 characters per SMS, I could send them a short book. Nigerian’s don’t read so by the time I’m done, I would be the biggest spammer in the world.

I could be magnanimous and get all Nigerians, still the whole 170M of us, 57 loaves of bread each. The bakers would be happy. But after the second loaf, everyone won’t be having that much fun.

Or maybe I could just buy phones? I could get 3,192,076 lucky guys iPhone 6. But trust me, we may get more! With that many number of phones, Jumia would be stupid not to cut a deal.

Or get them cars? I could add 109,358 Hyundai ix35 to Lagos traffic and just make everyone’s life more miserable. Or I could be nicer and simply get 15,540 Merc S500 to clog just Banana Island alone.

Let me do something more constructive though, let’s get everyone a home. Going by the going rate of new homes in my estate, I could buy terrace duplexes for 13, 122 families. With that many homes, we may simply start a new town. Yellow Town? It may be a cute name but a nightmare for interior decorators if we had to paint houses that color.

The traffic on Lekki Road is now so terrible so I’m actually more inclined to use the money for an alternative route from VI to God knows where. I would enjoy the sparring that Julius Berger, Hitech and PW Nigeria would have in my office but trust me, I won’t get less than 200KM of 10 lane NaijaBahn between Ahmadu Bello Way and beyond Epe. I could get to the office in 15 minutes. Wait, with that type of money, do I ever need to work again? I may just charter a Falcon 2000 and fly for 23 years non-stop.

Most people think that the Lekki-Ikoyi bridge had a lot of “pork” but let’s imagine that’s the real price, I may simply build 20 of such bridges. Ha ha ha, the folks in Ikoyi with their upturned noses would have to contend with Obalende and Ikate area boys who will then have more bridges to cross than ever.

We may really build 10 fourth mainland bridges and just move on.

You know the sad reality; we lose twice more than that every year to oil thieves. Today, bunkerers steal at least 400,000 barrels of oil today. Say they sell them at $30 per barrel, that’s some $4.3B going to someone in Nigeria today and not a simple SMS, bread, phones, cars, roads, bridges, for his community. Some people will simply roast in the toastier parts of hell!

4K TV – The New Gimmick in Town

I have tripped over more 4K TV cables in the last few weeks than all the bus drivers bashing cars in Lagos.

Suddenly 4K became the rave. You wonder what 4K is? 4K is to HDTV as HDTV is to SDTV. If you don’t know SDTV, you may want to read here. 4K is sometimes called UHD by purists. But purists be damned!

4K allows incredible fidelity of visual content. You only need to see any of those monsters on display and you are hooked forever. The biggest challenge is content though. Without a native 4K content, there is nothing glorious and orgasmic to see.

So there lies my problem – what are the 4K TVs doing in Nigeria? There are no 4K discs to watch and the internet is too poor to stream 4K content from the internet.

I guess maybe LG and Samsung are playing on guys’ greed or maybe lack of awareness. As far as I’m concerned, this is just an expensive gimmickry.

The real independence is from PHCN

October 1 is regarded as our national independence day although I’m not so sure if we are really free. The British may have gone but PHCN is still around, in some transformed way.

I was reading about the latest upset planned by Elon Musk and I had a good smile. Today, my day is made. Could I end up having a total energy independence? That is, if I could afford it. Before then, a little story.
One of the few luxuries I have been able to enjoy in this country is constant electricity. I know it sounds crazier than your cousin having a bubble bath right in the middle of Sahara Desert.

So where do I live? In some random part of Lagos! I live in a little enclave that happens to have a very bad electricity problem. Apart from the madness induced electricity given by the local utility, the estate itself has perennial problem of poor utility management that ensures that darkness is a constant factor.

But I’m in one of the rapidly expanding Nigerian club that discovered energy storage, popularly called inverters. I bet someone around you has it and it’s getting so popular that I expect it to supplant “I better pass my neighbor” soon. For a few friends that I have gotten on this bus, their greatest regret has always been getting inverters too late. Inverter has gone from nerdish to mainstream.
However, there is a catch, you still need to have some bits of electricity from the utilities or your generator to have this going. It doesn’t eliminate most of your cost or sometimes of your inconveniences but boy, it does a good job of hypertension alleviation!

What if I could invest some cash into solar panels and pair that with my inverter, could it be possible that I could snip of my wires?

The cost of solar panels is rapidly going down although the Naira exchange rate is making a mess of everything. But let’s say solar gets to a decent price point, going independent might be worth it. The biggest cost savings wouldn’t come from utilities bill but from cost of buying, fueling and maintaining generators. Lord have mercy!

So back to Elon Musk. His SolarCity wants to install up to 1GW of panels along with batteries over the next few months. Is my hope on Mr. Musk? Hell no.

Actually I’m hoping that this will spur copycats with price war, all the way to the bottom. Currently at today’s Naira, I need to shell out as much as N1.5M for a 5KW solar panels which isn’t a priority now. What happens if competition, innovation and business drives this down to N100K?

Think about it.