n Nigeria, financial technology is now all the rage with the proliferation of tech companies riding on the back of the country’s fast-evolving banking system and its vast population of digitally enabled youths to drive inclusion.
That space has been made more vibrant by the incursion of foreign fintechs bringing turnkey solutions as varied as mobile lending, e-commerce, payments and card issuance.
Timbo Drayson, who helped Google introduce web mapping platform Google Maps to Africa and the Middle East, is bringing a disruption to the mix with the smart addressing app OkHi, which enables businesses to track clients through proper addressing.
Mr Drayson was recently in Lagos and revealed the innovation could provide the latest touchpoint for service providers to know their customers better.
What transformation do you think OkHi’s smart addressing will bring to a frontier market like Nigeria considering that awareness of such fintech services is still low in the country?
We estimate that lack of addressing costs the Nigerian economy about $3 billion a year in inefficiency. It’s an enormous problem, much wider than just financial services. Our vision statement is “A world where anyone can use their OkHi address to access the services they need.” Extending that to Nigeria, imagine an environment where there is more financial inclusion due to people proving their address and their identity, e-commerce is a seamless checkout experience, deliveries are efficient and on time, to-the-door post is available, and perhaps most importantly, emergency services never get lost. Yes, today we’re focused on address verification for financial services, which is a market of about 40 million people, but tomorrow we will be Nigeria’s digital addressing system, making people’s lives easier and making businesses more efficient.
Digital mapping using mobile apps like Google Maps is still problematic in Nigeria in that users are sometimes misdirected by prompts on their phone, while some addresses may not feature on most apps. How will OkHi offer solutions to this?
The point is, in markets where there are functional addressing systems, there is a national database of addresses which Google Maps can leverage. It means as a user, you can put an address into Google Maps and very often navigate there. In a market like Nigeria, where there isn’t a proper addressing system, Google Maps is much less reliable. The way to see OkHi is we are creating that national address database. As we do that, other services like Google maps and Uber will work much more effectively.
How can smart addressing help financial institutions cut costs?
Currently, banks and some of the larger fintechs are sending agents to people’s houses to verify their address by checking if they live there, which can take weeks and cost up to N2000 per verification. We make it easy for businesses to verify their customer’s address through their smartphone, replacing utility bills and physical visits. As we proved in a pilot with Stanbic, we reduce the cost by 52%, and reduce the time by four times (and time equals money).