Fixing the PTA Palaver with Technology

There was a collective sigh of relief when the Central Bank of Nigeria recently decided to clear the backlog of travel allowances pending with banks. Nevertheless, a lot of well-meaning Nigerians could also see the opportunities for arbitrage and abuse. Of course, bad boys being bad boys, it quickly turned into a bazaar.

The Personal Travel Allowance, PTA, is a carryover of the ancient Nigerian command and control FX policies where the government, acting as the national nanny via the CBN, hands over FX at a subsidized rate of $4K per quarter. Never enough to build a mansion, yet the margins are sufficiently fat enough for anyone to do a quick deal. For example, the difference between the CBN rates and the alternative markets is about N120; that’s about N480K per quarter and N1.9M per year. Even the angels would be tempted.

Meanwhile, that’s nine times the annual minimum wage specified by the Federal Government.

Instead of looking a gift horse in the mouth by blaming the CBN, who could have turned the other way and let everyone roast with the BDCs of this world, some friends and I thought we could come up with ideas on how this can be managed with technology. Our sole object is to help those who need the FX to get them easily while ensuring the opportunity for abuse was minimized. After all, why blame the government for a poor policy if we don’t have clear alternatives.

After bashing our heads against the wall for some hours, we came up with the following:

FX Nanny Online 😊

The interesting thing with the Nigerian traveler is virtually every one of them has a bank account, and with that comes the dreaded Bank Verification Number, BVN. The BVN is probably the best invention to tame financial recklessness in Nigeria, but we are not utilizing up to 5% of its capabilities. That’s a story for another day.

To get FX for travel, the intending traveler would apply online at some random web app to be put up by the CBN. Let’s say it will be at www.fxnanny.cbn.gov.ng.

Travelers will specify the usual details: travel dates, airline ticket reference, travel document details (scanned copy of their passport), bank details, BVN, etc.

At application time, the web app will indicate the likely rate at which the FX will be sold.

The processing team can then review the application and if approved, make FX available by debiting the traveler’s account using the cardholders’ bank process. The processing must be automated, if not, it creates an opportunity for tingodism.

To ensure that abuse is kept to the minimum, travelers’ passports will be automatically validated with the immigration system, tickets checked against airline APIs, and when the traveler returns to the country, the travel records will be automatically checked against the immigrations airport database (does that even exist?).

And here comes the kicker. The FX will be available to a specific prepaid card which can only be used in the countries the travelers have specified and verified via their airline tickets. Additionally, the card or FX will only be active from the date of travel and cannot be used in Nigeria at all.

Travelers will need to buy the prepaid card from any bank, or their bank, and automatically, those cards will be tied to their BVN and be available for automatic loading. They won’t need to visit any bank branch.

Anyone found to have abused the system should be banned for half of eternity and made to spend two weeks with EFCC, washing plates, and detention cells.

Service could cost about 1% shared between banks, the platform provider, and the CBN. Someone has to keep the lights on!

Benefits to the Central Bank

  • It can finally have peace of mind and stop chasing banks around, hustling them to provide data about FX usage. That sucks a great deal.
  • The majority of PTA abuse can now be curbed. Of course, someone will always find a loophole, but that can be addressed when CBN gets to that bridge. Hopefully, not River Niger Second Bridge.
  • CBN will be able to have a real-time overview of the PTA market. It will be easy to ferret out insights into which countries people love to traipse to, which airlines love PTA users, which banks are playing games, etc. without issues.

Benefits to Travelers

  • With the assurance of a level playing field and the demystification of the man-know-man Nigerian problem, the regular traveler can have hopes of a decent PTA without sucking up to a raggedy teller in a bank branch.

Benefits to Banks

  • Earn commissions from processing the debit of travelers’ accounts and crediting the travel card. Should 0.65% be a good incentive?
  • The only source of temptation which has killed many budding careers would be taken away. Trust me; bankers regularly get steamrolled for FX infraction. In fact, it’s an existential risk for branch managers.

Apparently, our solution has glossed over many key issues. For example, who is going to build the application and maintain it? Is the CBN going to be allowed by card associations to issue cards? Will it issue MasterCard and Visa cards only? What will it say to Verve, Freedom, and Genesis cards? If the site crashes or slows down, who is going to be held responsible? What happens when a card is lost, stolen, or blocked? What happens when a traveler needs to change his travel plans?

I don’t have answers to these questions, but hey, the world is full of smarties. Anyone can contribute opinions below.

Dreamers are losers. Ideas are worthless.

Dreams are free, anyone can have them, but without action, they’re just clouds passing by. Turn these dreams into deeds and ideas into actions. Only then can you succeed.

I grew up lacking so many essential things like Lego toys, common sense, understanding further math, etc. but I never lacked dreams or ideas. I had them by the dozens. After all, dreams and ideas are free and require no permission from hawkish parents or even from the government. I tucked into them and generated dreams and ideas like a real dream machine.

Unfortunately, dreams and ideas didn’t get me anywhere because everyone had them too. And the dreams were getting them nowhere. Dreams are free; ideas can be plucked from anywhere; both useless and worthless.

Sounds counterintuitive, isn’t it? Everyone says, follows your dreams! Guys with ideas are courted and loved. So why the gripe?

My rant isn’t to diminish dreaming or ideas but to put them in their proper perspectives. So, before you start wondering who stepped on my toes this morning, hear me out.

Dreams and ideas aren’t constrained by physics or reality and would never be. If you ever watched Tom and Jerry, you will understand that.  Additionally, ideas and dreams are free, anyone with half a brain can conjure them up. I spent the majority of my childhood imagining myself as a superhero, and it was an excellent time – I can bet you spent yours with similar ideas.

But why are dreams and ideas so useless if we need them for innovation? Why am I valuing them down to nothing when to be called a man without a dream or ideas is worse than being called impotent? I mean, if you are not actually impotent.

There are also good and bad ideas – bad ideas being so many out there so why isn’t the good ideas worth something?

Let’s check out what happens in farming.

Send down the rain!
Rain and moisture are so important to agriculture that without it, a nation is imperiled. Just ask the Mayans, an ancient culture of South America, that was destroyed because of drought famine. But then, rain itself isn’t food! The fact that it rains doesn’t mean crop would suddenly appear in farms. For there to be food, farmers must till the ground, plant appropriate seeds and then let the rain do its job.

The value of rain to agriculture is so important that sometimes some fly planes to seed the sky with silver iodide, just like the way applying Robb or onions to your eyes let loose some crocodile tears. Gosh, I hate the kitchen!

Follow your dreams
In all the time I have spent mentoring others, I haven’t met a single mentee who doesn’t have dreams or ideas. We all have them by the dozens. What sets many back, however, is that they dream on and never wake up.

Many people find it hard to believe that dreaming itself means nothing and ideas are worthless if they are not put into use.

For example, I know gazillion friends who want to improve on their careers, yet they would never fix their CVs, network with potential employers or even take the time to understand the new roles they would love to play. That’s dreaming, and it wouldn’t amount to anything.

Not taking action to actualize dreams applies to me too – I have been talking about different side businesses that could bring little income each month. I have planned, discussed and ideated. Of course, if I don’t start it, risk my savings, it would never come to fruition and by January 2018, who am I going to blame for it?

Ideas are worthless
I recently asked a few friends who run their businesses what they could do to take their companies to the next level – I mean, who doesn’t want to achieve unicorn status. Even though I talked to them at different times, they all have the same ideas.

The sad part was, none was putting any of those ideas into action.
We complained about customer service in banks – for any banker reading this, do you know any bank who doesn’t tout customer service as a strategic imperative? Every bank does, but not every bank puts it into action. What a meaningless exercise.

The Conclusion
Dreams and ideas are only useful when combined with action and purpose. Do you want to be successful? Stop dreaming, start acting on the few nightmares you have had, and even the sky wouldn’t be able to contain you – just ask Elon Musk at SpaceX.

Those damned resolutions

Everyone makes resolutions, yet it’s always the same, forgotten like last year’s trends? Not anymore. Commit to monthly self-reviews, set delivery dates, and tie rewards to achievements. It’s time for discipline to meet ambition.

I have talked about it before, you have heard it too many times, nobody cares about it again. Yes, new year resolutions. We all made a few and like the years before; we have probably forgotten them by now.

We made resolutions knowing we weren’t as good as we wanted to be. Careers are stalled, bad habits run rings around our sensibilities, some want to be better dads, wives, husbands, parents, whatever! So we made tons of good-intentioned resolutions and without malice, forgot them as quickly as Donald Trump could fire a tweet.

For me, I’ve decided that this year would be different. At least, even if I don’t get to achieve all the items on the short list, it won’t be because I forgot them. Some are proving to be hard enough because of the additional shots of vodka in my cocktail when I wrote the list.

Nevertheless, I honestly believe that resolution items can be achieved, and even surpassed. I don’t even think it requires so much apart from a set of few tricks.

The methods are simple – I’ve people and myself, holding me accountable for the items on those lists and I’m committed to reviewing my progress every month. Also, there are things I would do/or not do, as a means of self-flagellation, if I don’t achieve specific results.
 
What self-review does
For those who have been unfortunate to work in banking, you would know the circus bankers do each month where sales guys and gals are grilled or sometimes pulped. That excruciatingly painful experience is called Monthly Performance Review. Many at times, there would be carnage and people never make it to the office the next day. Bankers gave it a bad name, but a regular review of performance is important for every organization, and if you run your life the way you run your job, it is something you must do if you want to succeed.

Commit, either to yourself or with someone you look up to, to review your 2017 resolutions each month. Maybe the first Saturday of the month? Be honest, assess your performance and ask tough questions about if you are getting nearer or not. If you are, give yourself a nice pat on the back. And if you aren’t, you have work to do. Do it.
 
Set Delivery Dates
By the way, I assume your resolutions have delivery dates. That you would repaint your living room without putting a specific time to do it is as good as not writing it down in the first instance.
We know that a pregnancy lasts for nine months and even without setting a delivery date or preparing for it, the baby would compulsory pop out, all things being equal. Your dreams are a special type of pregnancies, though, if you don’t set an EDD, they will die in your womb.
 
Goodbye Devialet Phantom Gold
I have been lusting after Phantom Gold for about few months, and I promised myself one this year. As much as I love to have that audiophile’s dream machine, I would never get one unless certain items on my resolution list are knocked off as done.

For example, if you don’t fix your CV, making it look like Bill Gate wrote it, you shouldn’t allow yourself get any Coldstone ice cream or Shawarma from Ebeano. If you don’t start that small side business to augment your salary, you can’t travel for summer (in this economy?). If you don’t save 50% of your salary each month (assuming the economy hasn’t wiped you out), you shouldn’t allow yourself to visit Hard Rock Café.
It sounds pretty silly, but it works. After all, who are you helping if not yourself?
 
A Moment to Reflect
There isn’t a better time to review a year than just at the start. January is gone already and February is already on its way. Trust me, before you can say, Jack Robinson, the year is done. Success isn’t usually some dramatic thing that happens in a bang but a series of normal things that stack up down the line.

Wouldn’t it be extremely sad if you procrastinate through the whole of 2017, when the economy is bad, Donald Trump is president, students are joining gangs, etc. and then reach 2018 to regret 2017? Meanwhile, your boss would continue, every month, to harass you about meeting set performance threshold. You will work your sorry ass out to achieve your team or company’s targets, your boss would get a fantastic bonus, probably go to Harvard/Stanford/INSEAD for a random executive course (which probably looks good on her CV but does no one any good) while you have nothing to write about.

Think. Act. Be disciplined.

Kennedy Uzoka is Nigeria’s coolest bank CEO

Kennedy Uzoka, UBA’s Group Managing Director, is the savviest bank CEO in Nigeria, as far as social media is concerned. Or so says an informal study by me.

He loves social media and practically hangs out there. While he won’t be allowed into the YMCA, he probably knows a thing or two about where and how to appeal to banking’s emerging core customers, Millennials. Based on the outcome of my, perhaps, dubious analysis, I decided to crown him a social media kingpin. He won’t be getting any plaque or prize money or anything. I don’t even know if he’s going to brag about it.

Recently, Herbert Wigwe, CEO of Access Bank was crowned the Twitter Lord by Business Day but as a tree doesn’t make a Zambisa forest, so also Twitter isn’t enough to rule the social media world. But then, that may be wrong, after all, Trump will rule America and the rest of the free world using nothing but Twitter.

So here’s how the CEOs stack up.

Chart from https://www.theatlas.com/i/atlas_SJdYZieIx.png showing how CEOs rank in social media

Nigerian banks will forever jostle for the eyeballs and minds of Millennials. I mean, social media was hot, digital banking is even an inferno now. It doesn’t take a soothsayer to know why; Millennials are the next target market as baby boomers start to die off gradually. Millennials live in the social media world, so no better place to hang out with them, pander to their whims, and hopefully, find a way to make some money off them.

In five years, Millennials, also known as Gen Y or those born in the ’80s and ’90s, will form the majority of the workforce. That means salaries, bonuses, shopping, car loans, mortgages, credit cards, DSTV, Netflix, chills, etc.
Unfortunately for banks in general and Nigerian banks, in particular, it has been mostly misses and few hits. At first glance, you wonder why because worldwide, 11 Nigerian banks are in the top 100 banks using social media. But we all know that you can’t run faster than the boss (let someone shout Hallelujah to that!).

So I wanted to know if the bosses are running in tandem with Millennials. After all, wouldn’t it be a strategic failure not to understand the life and time of the age cohort of those who would be banks’ greatest customers in the next few years?

Do the CEOs lead their banks by example? Do they even, on a personal level, understand social media, the platform on which the next generation of banking wars would be fought? If they lose out on Millennials, how do they plan to run their retail banking game?

Having little to do over the holidays, the devil in me played with some data and ranked Nigeria banking CEOs. Luckily, I’m out of banking else I could have found my sorry backside out of a job.

Methodology

  1. There are bajillion social media platforms out there and even the craziest of us all can’t keep up with the madness. So I look at the presence on just Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Having a profile on each gives a score of 5 or 0.
  2. Anyone can be on social media, being active is the real deal. So engagement is critical. Having an activity within the last 1 month gets 5 marks, the last 3 months gets 3 marks and nothing in 6 months gets 0
  3. Many CEOs got there in the last few years, but it doesn’t take minutes to update profiles. Having a current profile gets a score of 5 and none gets 0.

You can download the original data here.

Note

This report isn’t a real scientific study but a random ranting from an armchair boffin. So take whatever you’ve read with a pinch of salt. Don’t ever ever ever use it as a reference for your school assignment. Be warned!

Run your life like you run your job

As you jot down your resolutions, it’s worth pondering why it’s easier to achieve corporate goals than personal ones. Here’s a thought-provoking take on how to run your life like you do your deliverables at work.

I spent all of yesterday doing up my new year resolutions. Yeah, I know new year’s resolutions don’t work for most of us, and by the end of January, I probably wouldn’t remember where I wrote them down. Just like my resolutions, you probably have yours penned down, and year after year, nothing comes out of them.

While you are doing your resolutions, your evil boss (bosses are usually evil in January) is also writing up your deliverables for the year. Despite the daydream of sending a hit squad after her, by March, you have already fallen in love with the goals and all pumped up to achieve your corporate objectives. Guess what, come December 2017, you are probably done with 70% of the madness lined up for you at work. Unfortunately, you won’t be getting a bonus unless you do more than 100%. That itself is a big if!

Wait, hold up!

Come to think of it; you find it hard to do things that would make your life better and successful yet you can easily, even with your worst performance, hit a sizeable level of achievement of things that would make your boss richer at the end of the year? Ironic!

A question that keeps me awake at night – what if I can run my life just the way I do my deliverables at work?

After ruminating about this for a while, I figured out the reason why: immediate and delayed repercussions.

Immediate repercussions

We are all geared to respond to positive and negative stimuli like overworked Pavlovian dogs. If you touched a life wire, you get shocked. If you cross the road without checking properly, the Danfo driver who drank adulterated paraga would run you down. Everyone knows of the immediate consequences of bad behaviors, so we simply avoid them.

The same happens at work, if you don’t deliver on the targets or KPIs set by your boss, you probably going to get a one-way ticket to HR and your ass would be out of work. If you are consistently late to work, one day you would do it one more time too often; You will most likely be scouring LinkedIn for openings the week after. Don’t even think about getting drunk at work or slapping someone; that kills you faster than a speeding bullet. No wonder nobody fights in the office!

The average professional does reasonably well at work and a miserable job of his career.

Delayed repercussions

So what happens when you don’t do that certification you, the world and I know is going to give your career a boost? Because your punishment is chilling in the future and you probably can’t hear it whistling.
You promised yourself a change of job, but the efforts to tidy up your CV and start networking is proving too hard. Of course, a new job won’t come, and with the economy taking a tumble faster than a beached whale, you can be sure that your life would be more miserable by December 2017.
If you don’t quit smoking as you have promised your wife or girlfriend for the past five years, one more cigarette won’t have your lungs give up immediately. But like a nicely marinated croaker fish, it takes a while, but once your lungs are nicely roasted, nobody has been able to invent a means to un-roast it.

You find it hard to save for your mortgage down payment, but you could easily find extra cash to rock the clubs Friday nights and hit the Bahamas with your homies for the summer. You pay more than your EMI in rent. Nevertheless, you are the one who is driving a cost-cutting proposal for your company and saved $10M last year by canceling some office perks, downgrading everyone from 4 to 3-star hotels while on travel, and discovered that nixing the free coffee and buns won’t kill employee morale. You didn’t get a dime in bonus for that; you were freaking doing your job! By the time you are fifty, your rented apartment would have appreciated in value, but none of that comes to you.

The Key

So I figured out that if an immediate repercussion could be tied to the fantastical new year resolutions, maybe there could be an impetus for one to achieve them.

Have achievable resolutions

Have goals that are reasonable and achievable. I mean you are smart; you know what I mean. If you try to swallow something too big, you are probably going choke and die. Same for goals too audacious for your good.

Don’t have too many resolutions

Too many cooks upturn the pot, scattering the evening dinner all over the kitchen floor. Too many resolutions mean you would be scared of the daunting tasks after the enthusiasm of January 1 has gone. At best, don’t have more than 5.

Be answerable to someone

Share your goals with someone you admire and respect. Not wanting to disappoint them is a strong incentive to achieve. I mean, who wants to look like a wimp to her boyfriend? Well, unless your boyfriend is also a wimp. If so, maybe your first resolution would be to get rid of him.

Move with the right crowd

Psychologists have studied peer pressure for as long as humanity. They weren’t called psychologists then, though. Most of the bad habits I have today I got from my friends (don’t ask me what they are but I can tell you who they are). Fortunately, my grades in school turned for the better when I started hanging out with the right crowd. If your friends are loafers, you would be one. If you want to have a superlative career, start being friends with those whose lives you admire. In trying to copy them, you could end up even better than them.

Run from negative people who never see anything good in life, they are like a prick to your enthusiasm balloon. Instead of floating to the sky, they make you fall like a lead.

Bad habits can be good

Trust me, pure envy and jealousy can be a game-changer if it drives you in the right direction. Have you ever gone to the mall and you see your old school buddy more successful than you, who tortured you by introducing his trophy wife and his Bentley Bentayga? You probably burned with jealousy but instead of having schadenfreude, why don’t you prove that you are better than him? Just drive yourself insane to achieve your resolutions, and you can have much more. Be careful of getting a trophy wife, though, you can lose all that money faster than you made them.

Time to go

I’m going to try all these methods on myself this year, and I hope they work. If they don’t, we can review other methods by 2018.

With all seriousness, you owe yourself a good life. Fortunately, you have all it takes to succeed, after all, you are a star at work. Apply the same skills you use to balance budgets, deliver projects, learn new skills, take care of customers, etc. to your life and you would see amazing results.

Happy New Year everyone!