Pursuing Great Purpose: Sustainable Impact and Partnerships for Tech Businesses

Keynote Speech by Olu Akanmu, President and Co-CEO OPay-Nigeria at the Techpreneur Summit ’23, organized by the Development Bank of Nigeria Plc

 Thank you to Development Bank of Nigeria for the opportunity to speak with you on theme of the Techpreneuer 23: Promoting Innovation and #Sustainable Partnership. The Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN) has a lofty mission which is to “facilitate sustainable socio economic #development through the provision of finance to Nigeria’s underserved #MSMEs through eligible financial intermediaries”. I congratulate DBN on the good work you have been doing fulfilling your mission and providing #inclusivefinance for more of MSMeS, millions which have been historically excluded from formal financial services. At OPay, we share with you a similar purpose which is to deepen #financialinclusion through the use of technology.  Inherent in your mission statement is an intent of #partnership working through eligible intermediaries to reach your #MSME target markets. This occasion of Techpreneur Summit  is therefore very appropriate. While we all continue to push the frontiers of financial inclusion, the experience of Q1 this year, during the limited cash implementation tells us of the imperative to do more to get many more of our 45m MSMEs financially included. Many of the MSMEs during the time, did not have #digital #payment collection capabilities and were significantly challenged at the period. OPay played its part along with other players in the ecosystem to solve this problem. Yet there is still so much to get done to bring millions of our MSMEs into the formal financial rail.

Delivering inclusive MSME finance in Nigeria is fulfilment  of great #purpose. According the National Bureau of Statistics, four of every five Nigerians in employment are self employed. Most them we can extrapolate would be MSMEs in the informal sector and financially excluded. Solving the challenge of inclusive finance for the MSMEs would therefore strike at the heart of social exclusion problem in Nigeria and enabled us to build a society of more widely shared prosperity, a Nigeria that works for many more people. If you could therefore permit me, I will like to modify the theme of my short talk to “Pursuing Great Purpose: Sustainable Impact and Partnerships for Tech Businesses.”

 Large Social and Commercial Exclusion in Nigeria

We all do know of the Nigeria poverty data that 63% of our people are multi-dimensionally  poor. What I will like to focus on however is the link between poverty and commercial markets and large commercial exclusion in Nigeria. When Business, especially traditional ones define its addressable market, it tends to define it as markets or market segments where it could do business at a profit, unless that business is driven by some high altruistic goal of social impact which is not very common. The reality therefore is that for most commercial business, given 60% of our people being poor, where they cannot see profitable market opportunities, our businesses are largely focused commercially on serving 40% of Nigeria or at best just about half of the Nigeria population and they would be largely irrelevant to the other half. I describe this as the challenge of high commercial exclusion in Nigeria. The cost of this high commercial exclusion is huge on society. We see this in financial inclusion where formal financial services reach just 51% of our people, in high rate child malnutrition as many children have no access to nutritious meals, constrained access to formal education with #Nigeria having one of the highest populations of children out of school and similarly in health care and high energy poverty. If it is true, that talents are evenly distributed but opportunities are not, the exclusion of about half of our people from commercial markets represents potentially throwing away 50% of our national commercial potential in terms of potential large markets, employment and shared prosperity.

Nigeria is indeed a tale of two countries with our acute social inequalities. Even our #tech communities and #businesses are beginning to behave like the traditional commercial incumbents focusing on just about half of our population and excluding the rest. In financial services for example, there are more fintechs and fintech investments focused on providing more services for the underserved, (that is those who are already banked but underserved by banks) , than those who are focused on extending  financial services to half of the population that have been historically excluded. According to the EFINA 2020 Access to Finance Comparative data, #Kenya has 83% formal financial inclusion in 2019, 44% provided by banks and 39% provided by non banks which would be largely fintechs. Essentially, the fintechs in Kenya extended the financial service rail by 39% nearly doing as much as the #banks in reaching new historically excluded customers. The comparative data in Nigeria is that while formal financial inclusion is 51%, 45% of the served were done by banks and only an additional 6% were exclusively served by non-banks mostly #fintechs. Essentially fintechs and non- banks in Nigeria, as at 2020 in the real sense only extended the financial rail by just 6%. I am sharing these numbers to prick the conscience of our tech entrepreneurs , tech brothers and sisters, that there is a greater social purpose we have to fulfil to drive more extended financial inclusion not just to chase the customers of incumbent banks even when they may be underserved. Our social impact is bigger that way. You do not need to look too closely to see that most of our tech #ecosystem activities are concentrated in Lagos, Abuja, Port Hacourt and few big commercial cities. Our tech brothers and sisters must recognize that we must make as much impact in Lekki as well as Lokoja, that we must make as much impact in Abuja as well as in Abonema and that we must make as much impact in Port Harcourt as well as in Potiskum.  We must ensure that we live no one behind in being part of the opportunities of the modern digital financial system. That is the lesson of #Cashless in Q1 this year, that we all have so much to do collectively as a tech ecosystem in extending the digital financial rail and make it more inclusive.

Sustainable Business Impact           

Friends, sisters and brothers, let me now discuss in the second part of this talk, the subject of sustainable business impact and partnerships,  part of the theme of this event.  There are two dimensions of sustainable business impact which are sometimes in healthy tension. The first is the overall positive impact of our business interventions on society and the second is ensuring that our businesses that are doing great impact work, are commercially sustainable as  “going concerns”. The tensions can be very tough especially for businesses that wants to pursue great altruistic purpose .  I have personally however learnt that between good technology innovation and partnerships are usually the resolution for these tensions. Digital #innovation enables us to do far more for less with its low transaction cost of information search, matching of buyers and sellers, low bargaining and order fulfilment costs. Digital #technology enables radically new business models that unlock #markets that were historically thought unprofitable and historically excluded. This #digital innovation effects when combined with partnerships could expand market access and reach, at scale and at low cost. The #ecosystem also tend to have many assets in business and organizational silos that when networked together in deliberate #partnership,  for a bigger #purpose,  could create more value for society, the customers and the businesses than own them.

There is however the challenge of sometimes large information asymmetry  in the ecosystem in which players who have potential complementary assets for partnerships cannot discover themselves. How do we solve this? Programs like this Techpreneur summit facilitated by the DBN are one of the ways in which the market information and discovery problem could be solved, bringing diverse players together to discover potential partnership opportunities. So if you are here today, please, make sure you network well. However more importantly, please, know that there is now a digital borderless world for information discovery today, that enables you to find the assets that could complement yours, to discover partners that could complement you, innovating jointly to solve social and market problems.

 #Regulation                                                               

In forming partnerships, it may be important to think thorough if there would be regulatory implications of our proposed partnerships. And if so, engage regulators proactively and where necessary seek regulatory guidance and approvals. The cost of not recognizing potential regulatory implications of partnerships could be very severe in unwinding of relationships, unwinding co-joined assets and loss of investments in franchise built on such partnerships. As we innovate jointly in partnerships, we must also have a good view of compliance and regulations and put as much zeal in the proactive #management of regulatory and #compliance issues as the engineering design and franchise building plans of our partnership products. Tech and ecosystem players should have an open mind approach to regulation, recognizing that #regulators see wider and broader than our individual businesses in terms of macro-effects of innovation and perhaps their un-intended consequences. I have found the Steve Covey principle from the 7th Habits of Highly Effective People , one of which says “Seek first to understand before being understood ‘ as a very useful principle in engaging regulators. Seek first to understand any potential concern of the regulators and address it, then you can after seek the understanding of the regulator for your innovative proposal. You are more likely to get regulatory empathy and guidance this way than if you ignore regulation in your innovative journey.

 Fair Deals in Partnership

The subject of fair deals in partnerships is always a big contending issue, especially for #startups who sometimes feel they are getting the short end of the stick. The reality is that in partnership #negotiation, what you will get is function of  your market, commercial or asset power relative to your partners. Those who own platforms that are gateways to access large base of customers at scale, tend to exact strong market access power and toll gate effect. You see this from #telecoms to tech, to #fintech and all verticals. #Google and #Apple through the Google Play store and the IOS App store respectively have strong toll gate revenue from apps on their platform that can be largely accessed by new customers through those platforms. While a new potentially great app product may grumble, it cannot say it will not make itself available on the Playstore or Apps store because it is not getting the commercial deal it wants. Those who did that have found that no one knows them and their franchise become largely limited. The issue then for start ups is to evaluate the opportunity cost of not connecting to big platforms even when they hold the short end of the stick, compared  to what they would get if they do not partner,  to expand their reach and market access. In many instances, market access and the potential to reach a large base of customers tend to be always worth the price paid for the partnership with big platforms. And as the startup build a successful franchise through its market access and as its market and commercial power increases, it can re-negotiate initial commercial agreement for better deals.

 Conclusion                                                   

In conclusion, friends, sisters and brothers, I have done quick tour of several issues on the subject of good purpose, innovation, sustainable business and partnerships. The common thread among these issues is that we collectively have duty and great purpose to use the best of our organizational assets in finance and technology to collaborate,  innovate and impact on our people, to make Nigeria a country that works for many more people, a nation where prosperity is more widely shared. We must all play our own parts, working together to arrest the drift of Nigeria into a tale of two countries. That is the greater (big picture) purpose of programs such as this Techpreneur event. My commendations to the Development Bank of Nigeria, the organizers and everyone who is participating. Best wishes to us all as we make a difference.

 Thank you.

 Olu Akanmu

 July 4th ,  2023.