 All right, thanks for taking us now. Technology can be used to manage the economy by collecting and analyzing data to make better decisions. Now, improving efficiency and promoting economic development. For instance, the Central Bank of Nigeria. And the government can use data to track trends in the economy and identify potential risks. Technology can also be used to streamline business registration and permit possessing processes, rather. And it can also be used to invest in infrastructure, education, and research to boost productivity and growth. So today we're asking, how can individuals and SMEs manage the economy using technology? All right, so Jennifer, what do you think about technology? I think technology has been able to help businesses these days, right? With the way it works, even for small businesses, shop owners, store owners, supermarkets, or when you bring it down to a proper organization, technology is like the foundation of everything. So as technology is advancing, businesses need to get with the program. If you're talking for a lead to shop or a small shop, for example, you use POS as technology. You probably use a system for inventory or stock taking. So at the end of the day, everyone uses technology, except you want to remain in the stone age. But yeah, for every business who has incorporated technology into their daily transactions, they've seen that things move faster. It makes it way more easier for you. And it just gives you a breath of things, basically. You know the interesting thing? I mean, here you speak. So my sister, I went to see her one of the weekends, and she asked me to get her peanuts. So when I also, no, sorry, she asked me to get her plantain. There's a particular woman she buys plantain from, and the woman always has very nice peanuts as well. I remember that when I got there, because I had limited cash with me, right? And I told her, oh, I wanted to get plantain. How much was the plantain? How much was the peanuts? She now said, so immediately I asked her, I said, do you take transfers? And because, you know, it's quite a distance, you know? My sister leaves, right? So I said, do you take? Immediately she said, yes. I was just about to pick probably like one peanut and the plantain that my sister asked me to get. I ended up buying two sets of those plantain, about five of the six bottles of the peanut, just because there was ease of payment, because I didn't need to go and look for cash. So, you know, if you are not, because I mean, just to allude to what you are saying, if you do not embrace technology, you are actually selling yourself short. There are so many people that would spend a lot of money, as long as it's just a click of a button that they're doing an online transfer. For instance, right? But when I hear some people say, I bet we don't need to transfer cash, cash, cash, cash. I just wondered, like, are you sure you're ready for the business of the future? Because there will be a time nobody will know what a NIRON note looks like, because everything will purely, will just be based on electronic transfers. Look at what is happening. I mean, when you travel outside of the country, I remember one year like that, we went all of us to the UK. So, we were shopping and all of that. You know, we were planting my mom, my dad, my husband, my children, my sister, her husband and children. Then my youngest daughter was still single, so she just was just hard. So we were just in the mall. By the time it was time to pay an engineer, we don't carry pounds. 50, 50 pounds. You know, for you to see 50 pounds, it's too big of a currency. You know, normally what you will see is like 10 pounds, 5 pounds. So we brought our 50, 50 pounds to pay. Ha! They call manager. They call this one. They call the manager. You will see that after this person used one pen to check it. Another person, you will give to the other person. Yeah. Because they are not used to cash transactions. They are used to like, you know, just go, you know, so even from your phone, just can your phone be paid. Yeah, your favorite. Some people just touch your card. They don't even put in pen and they'll just put your card there. It's been debited, right? So, if we understand where we're going, again, with technology, definitely there's no how transformation will not happen. Even you as an individual, you become a lot more efficient, right? I mean, we ordered something this evening. I was saying, how do you pay? You say, oh, as long as there's an account number. So I'm never afraid to do any business, any transaction anymore. As long as I have a mobile phone that has a data, you know, I'm able to transact business. Same thing, even with business. As my business, I can do my business from anywhere. I was on the road coming back, you know, and I couldn't meet up with the time. So I set up my team's meeting. We had the meeting online with the client and all of that. We sorted out, because we had a weekly meeting prior to when we would eventually shoot and all of that. So we've been having that weekly meeting every Friday. So, I mean, without technology, some of these things would have been really difficult. It would have meant that you have to do this. You have to go and look for, you know, there's just so much ease that technology has caused. Even with your team, you don't have to physically be in the office. You can work remotely and say, okay, what's happening? You work remotely. It is only possible because technology is available. You know, so even all this work from home policies and all of that is helping because of the hardship or maybe transportation and all of that. It is technology that is backing it. So if you as a business, you're not looking in that direction of technology, it's gonna be difficult. But I don't know if we have our guests now because our guest is supposed to join us. Ah, okay, Jeffrey. I was just talking, I did not know you had joined. Hi, Jeffrey. You look amazing, by the way. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Good evening, everyone. Hi. Good evening, Jeffrey. So, you know, speaking to technology, without technology, this would not have been possible. So like literally there's nobody that should look away from technology. All right, so thank you for joining us. I mean, you heard the conversation and the banter that we had, right? Currently, the economic situation is quite choking, right? A lot of things, you go into the marketplace, you see things around, you know, like the prices, everything is just like skyrocketing, right? I mean, for small businesses, I'm thinking, what's the quickest way for easy inventory? Like yesterday, I was going on the website, normally, if I wanted to buy electronics and all that, I wanted to get a defreezer. I went on this particular website when I was talking of the office, buying ACs and all of those things. It was just their website I went to check the price so that I could do my budget. Do you know I went to that website? It was not functional. It was not functional because I'm suspecting that because of the rising cost of things, so that you don't get a price and they now come and say, but I saw this price on, so they've just shot down, a lot of companies are shutting down their websites and all of those things because they cannot keep up with the rising, what's it called, inflations and all of that. So how do we manage our businesses? First of all, as a business and as individuals, how do we manage it with this fluctuating economy and how do we leverage technology to do so? Jeff, are you there? Oh, shoot. I'm still here. Okay, so did you get the question? I can hear you now. Yes, I did. Okay, go ahead, please. Okay. Okay, so most times people always talk about technology as you did and you only focus on payment. So when you were talking about the granite example of like what, there's a lot more technology than just collecting money. So when we look at technology and how it impacts businesses and the economy, you are first trying to start the journey by looking at why do people provide technology or why do people want to implement technology? So I'll tell you maybe five or 16. So the first is that it allows transparency. Now transparency is not just about collecting money, but every other part of your business you can see and you can take better decisions, right? Now that you have inflation, cost is rising, resources are scarce, you want to be able to make the right kind of decisions and technology creates that transparency across your businesses, so you take better decisions. You're looking at accountability. Technology allows you to become accountable and the reason is because what you've committed to doing, nobody can go and change it because technology allows those KPIs to remain and that allows everyone within your organization to do what they need to do to be able to support your business objectives and allow you to grow as a business. So it's beyond just payment and I'll talk a bit around those areas. Technology allows availability as well. So I like your example, but more often if the business is remote, if the business is a physical brick and mortar, it gives you availability. So if I'm trying to buy at 12 a.m., 2 a.m. or I am in another time zone, I can still patronize you even when you're sleeping. So it creates that availability for you as a business. It also gives efficiency as well. And that's always tell people that if you look at the time it takes you to manually do something and how much time you save by implementing technology in your business, you find that you are more efficient, you require less resources and you achieve more outputs as a business. And this is now the most important part of being more efficient now that resources are more expensive wall scars. Now it also enables integration. So integration means that as a business you can connect with other businesses and cross-sell across a more bigger pool of customers, right? So I could be a male salon and you could be a female salon and two businesses that exist differently can integrate together and offer this broader customer base, a cross-section of services that you standing alone may not be able to provide. And that automatically expands your offering, expands your customer base and expands how much money you can make as a company. And finally, it keeps you informed. So who are you could be there and flip your phone and find out how much has been sold in your salon as an example. How many customers have they said, right? How much cash is in the bank? All of this gives you the information through technology to make fast instant decision that promotes your business, right? In the way it should. So this is why technology is important even within an economic sense which is Nigeria in this context. With the right technology, the government will lose less money, right? They will lose less money. With the right technology, they would encourage trade. With the right technology, they would grow the GDP of the transport sector, the healthcare sector, the energy sector, the shipping sector. I can go on how technology can enable all of that. So you are spot on on that, yeah? People do need to start thinking how can I enable technology to scale or structure or make my business more efficient. Yeah, Jennifer, you wanna come in? So I wanted to, I just wanted to ask a few questions, right? Now, for small businesses that are trying to incorporate technology into their business. So let's say an SME, for example, who hasn't even started yet, right? And they're thinking of expanding or trying to make their processes a bit more seamless and efficient. How do you suggest they go about it? Well, they are basic technology that some of them are even free, by the way, that you could incorporate into your business. So let's say you run a pharmaceutical business and you want to expand to the northern and the southern part of Nigeria. Maybe you started your business in Lagos, right? If you have an inventory management system, you don't have to stock inventory in multiple locations and have overhead cost of warehouse, right? Your big business could have a central warehousing that says it's your five, 10, 20 locations using an inventory management purchase management or ordering management central system. That's what technology does. Now, taking away that inventory management or that's central system, what would happen is you would want to stop all the shop with things they don't need because you don't want them to run out. That's the first one and that takes a lot of money. The other is that you're going to employ a lot of people that will call each of these outlets and try to take orders from them so that they can go and buy. However, an integrated system just tells you shop A is running on this, lowering low on this item. It needs to be restored. Data is available and it can also request for that stock because it's a high selling item and operations becomes cheaper because you can batch all those items and you don't have to send it every time. At once, you reduce your cost of operations. Have stock available all the time and improve your sale. So in a scenario that you have mentioned, I would recommend this kind of technology that allows you cross-manage everything you have from a central place. And you said this is available free? Some of this technology is available for free, for you to test. Of course, it would come with limited features but then you pay. Yeah, absolutely. But what do you think about people that are bringing in? So for instance, small businesses, Jeffrey, I know that a lot of companies are beginning to come together and they will create that marketplace platform. I just don't want to mention brands but I've seen some business models where small business just come and create your own shop within the larger platform. So it helps to manage. So you are checking, you're tracking all these things you've mentioned. You can do it but not owning the platform. It's almost like renting a space on the platform and allowing your customers to see you and transact business with you. What would you say, is that a good thing for small businesses to explore? Of course, absolutely. I don't know if you can hear me clearly. Yes. Confirm that we can. Yes, we can. Let's hope it's going off and on. Okay, so all right. So we're living in what is called a digital platform era. The way businesses and technology has evolved is it's not becoming more of a shared service where you have a digital platform. Then you start... Oh, sugar. And you have digital malls where you issue out some parts of the businesses or stages to them. That technology is called a store. Okay, you know what? Let's go on a very short break. And a lot of businesses in Africa are already implementing. Jeffrey, we lost you for a second. You said that business is called a what? It's called a storefront technology. Okay. Business model is available today. So we'll talk about it when we come back from the break. Yes, let's go on a break. Stay with us, we'll be right back. All right, thanks for staying with us. Now, if you're just tuned in, we're discussing how we can manage the economy using technology. And Jeffrey's giving us, I mean, great nuggets already. Remember, you can join this conversation, send us an SMS or WhatsApp to the red one, 8034663. All right, so I mean, Jeffrey, we are back. I don't know if you can hear me. So that model, right? I am sure you are aware of the few ones that we have in Nigeria here. How successful are those platforms? And why is it difficult? Because I have a friend, she is the partnership manager in one of those platforms, right? And I mean, she keeps saying that, getting the SMEs to onboard on those platforms is almost like, you know, you have to do a lot of preaching and all of that. How are they not able to see the benefit? Or is it that the companies themselves, they need to go back to like, restructure and look at it again. Maybe they are, what's it called? Their storytelling is not right. It's not resonating with the businesses. Where do you see that gap? Why are people not embracing this already, like easy technology that would help you move your business forward? That's a good question. But I'll start because I've been part of some projects that have developed something similar, right? One of the things that you have is that a typical Nigerian business wants to maximize the effort it has created the platform because of the cost of doing that. So they would want to accumulate all sorts of industries, all sorts of businesses on a singular platform. What you find outside Nigeria is that they are customized platforms for hospitality. They are customized platform for food. So when you come on those platforms, you see something that you are familiar with. You are comfortable because it is speaking the language that pertains to your industry and your business. But when you come on this platform, it's huge, it's big, it offers all sorts of things that you may never even know how to use because they are building it from an economy of scale points of view so that every business can use it without having to duplicate their effort. For me, that's fundamentally one of the issues there. The second issue is that the ability to train and support onboarding is lacking in Nigeria. We are still a developing country that requires a lot of education. Even well-educated people who are not techie find it hard to use technology still. So when companies are building these platforms and they're trying to onboard people, they usually assume that anybody could just get on. Why is it so hard? It's simple thing like ABC. To you as a technology company, of course, you know tech, but to a typical business, they might not know. And remember, it's not the business owners that are using this technology. They are people that they're employing to use this technology. So I think that when companies can crack that onboarding experience and that training availability for fluff staff to use this platform, there'll be a lot of adoption. And then finally, you have the parts of the real issue is payment. Now, because everybody wants to take your money, they focus on payment. And we also did when you started talking about technology. But there are other parts of our businesses that requires technology. Let's leave money taking as secondary. You might create a model where you're not sharing transaction fees. You could be monthly subscription, but don't touch the transaction fee of the customer. Those models are there. They might not bring all the big money and the constant inflow, but it's a model that you can introduce that makes people more comfortable knowing that a part of their revenue is not being shared per transaction, but they're just paying a monthly subscription or an annual subscription to get the tools that they need to provide for their business needs, customers, operations, inventory and all of that. I think these three things that I've just mentioned can really help and improve adoption. I mean, just to add to what you said, to your last point, right? It makes a lot of sense as a business person. Now, look at it. I retail skincare for over a decade. And I mean, the margins on skincare, right? If it's not now that they are doing crazy margins like 70%, usually your markup is about 40 to 45%. And this is factoring in the cost of your staff, rent, power, all the works, right? That is the markup for the 5%. So if I were to sell something, you know, and I put a 45% markup and you're asking me for a percentage from my profit, it's not gonna make sense to me as a business person. I'd rather just go and find the traditional way to promote my business and just sell off your firm without using your platform. I was gonna say that even outside of the monthly subscription, right? It would be nice for this platform because again, it's traffic, right? That we're generating. We're generating traffic. What if this revenue, say even this subscription is not there anymore? Because why? People are now placing, what's it called, adverts on those platforms. So even without you paying a subscription or whatever, just because of the traction that drives towards that platform, they make revenue from what's it called, advertisements and all of those pop-ups and all of those things. Like they are creative ways because it's media. They are creative ways you can create, what's it called, the buzz around the platform that you can now begin rather to generate income without having to touch your, what's it called? Your customers. I mean, what do you call it? Merchants or whatever. You don't need to touch whatever it is, the income that they are making within your platform. But I think maybe it's too much to ask in this part of the world. So I think the problem is that there is a lot of costs that comes to developing technology. It's still not cheap. And so to cover that cost, I mean, well, if the employer is a product manager, you probably want to take $6,000 a month. So where do you want to cover that? More than that. So to cover that cost, I mean, the business model is supporting the cost it takes to develop technology. So I understand that until there's sufficient economy of scale in time of adoption and usage, it will still be a bit expensive for the average person. However, it is great to know on this show so that those who are listening that some of these platforms, these storefront platforms offer their services for free. So you get on these platforms for free, but you share the percentage of the transactions that you make with the providers of this platform. So for business owners, this is how I think you should look at it. Before you go and share one or 2% of your revenue, you are making 100,000 a month. If I get on this platform and I'm generating 300,000, then the cost of technology is the 2% that I'm giving off. And that, I think, is a fair market price for increasing your business by 200%. However, if you are coming on a platform and the marginable increase of your business does not justify the cost of technology, then I don't think that your business is fit for that or there is an adjustment to your business model that needs to be looked at. Absolutely. Jennifer? I agree with everything that he has said. Well, I also know that the most important thing for small business owners is to look at everything holistically, right? How much you're making. What your revenue is and basically your costs, what you're going to spend on these technologies. Like he said, I know some of those platforms that are free for you to use, that kind of thing. But one thing that I've noticed is one of the reasons why some of these businesses prefer not to go on that platform is, one, going on that platform sometimes does not guarantee you sales, which is one. Two, you have to end up doing your own, promote your own marketing, which of course you still have to spend that much money. And doing marketing like that, you probably have to do it on a separate platform and then drive traffic to their platform. So that they're on their own platform. So why don't I just trust myself and drive people to my platform? You have businesses who have gotten to a certain level, probably they've made enough profit to be able to create their own websites, right? Because if you go to some of this marketplace, the way it is structured is not exactly beautiful, right? It's just, it's like brick and mortar. You just go there, put the pictures and all of that and that's it. And another thing that makes small business owners not to put your items on these marketplaces is one, the fact that they have to start creating inventory. So basically you have to upload pictures, you have to put in pricing, you have to do that. But you will still do that in your platform anyway. So that's what I'm saying, like for some people, that's why they don't want to do that, right? They would rather just go on Instagram or Facebook and do a usual normal post or they post on their WhatsApp story. Or do the sponsored ads. Exactly. So if your business is on your WhatsApp, for example, all you just need to do is post the picture and the price and then that's it and you let people message you. But that would be limiting because WhatsApp is also limited to only the people that are your contacts, yeah. So are you going to continue to target your contact list forever? So the thing is, those are some of the reasons why people do not want to use those kind of platforms. But I also think that those platforms are, they are quite helpful, right? It kind of helps you. Like he said, he helps you check your inventory. Sometimes you even get notification. They tell you, oh, you're low on this or one of your items is out of stock. Do you want to add more or is it completely out of stock? Are you done with that? That kind of thing just keeps you informed on what is going on in the backend. And even as if you're the only person controlling your business, your CEO, your sales person, your social media manager, your finance and everything. It actually helps you, right? It takes away the stress of having to do a lot of things at the same time. It's just, I don't know, it's just at your fingertips. Okay, Jeffery. So I also think that, go ahead. The thing that in order to approach the markets, I think technology providers needs to start changing the narrative. Everybody sings the same song and that makes the customer feel that the only value you can give me is payment. There are three parts of the business that are scribbling down as we're talking. The first is your business operations. The second is your customer management. The third is the opportunity that it creates in terms of partnerships, right? And the other is money management because you're making the right money decisions because of managing your inventory like you have mentioned, right? So I think that when the narrative changes to other parts of the business that really promotes the economy as we're talking about this evening and beyond just payment, people will begin to take notes because then you're customizing the solution to solve economic problems within business units. And that is the narrative that needs to change. It doesn't change yet. If a typical person comes to me to sell technology, it comes from, oh, you can collect money from anywhere and all of that, but they have more deeper business needs that really impacts from an economic point of view. I get you 100% because a lot of times people just focus on the sales part. Oh, you can make money, you can sell, people can pay online, blah, blah, blah, blah, but imagine if we started helping small businesses with their customer management, with their, what's it called? Operations management, with their people management. It's a lot because now, like you rightly said, it's like you are running your company within a larger company, right? You are a small company in the big picture. So everything will be set up. I mean, that's how this, my friend's platform is. They set up a company within their own platform for you. So everything, you're seeing it. So if you're putting in 50 weeks, you understand? And as it's going down, they are giving you, so there's inventory management, there's a lot of things happening there. I mean, a lot of people are embracing this technology. I did my internship as a product manager for one of the companies, I mean, this is the entire solution that they're giving, solving the problem from the positions of money, for FMCG, so manufacturers down to their distributors, down to their merchants, down to the retailers, right? So that entire value chain, they've provided so much solution that in fact, the distributors right now is almost like, come on, you've made my life so easy. So I hear you, Jeffrey, and it's the truth. And the reason why their own business model is actually successful is because they're selling this value proposition that Jeffrey just mentioned. They're not just focused on sales. It is these other parts. But Jeffrey, if you want to look at the big picture, right, for Nigeria, like literally because we are trying to promote the idea that it is possible for us to have a very healthy economy in Nigeria, right? If we say we want to start to look from maybe the standpoint of government, you know, what would be, what would a beautiful solution look like in terms of e-commerce or technology for SMEs, small businesses within Nigeria that it can become so interconnected and powerful that the entire, so I mean, there is yam in Benway States, right? People need yam in Lagos. There's cow in Kaduna, like literally all these things that we do, you know, is there a way we can actually start to think big picture where the government invest heavily because technology is heavy investment and they would actually begin to see this economy grow because they can even, what's it called? They can track their taxes with this because I hear that banks, I mean, federal government and they are going into people's bank account to go and get their taxes from source. So how can they leverage technology to help with business, what's it called? Transactions at the same time, you know, monitor the economy and grow the economy. So if you look at the numbers, excuse me, if you look at the numbers in Nigeria, you have 45 million MSMEs, right? You've got about maybe 19 million SMEs and about five million enterprise in number. What is similar across all these three businesses is that they go to the government to register their business. So from the journey of engaging the government, the government already knows that these people exist. If you want to help these businesses and you want to integrate these businesses, that first interaction of registering your business, the government should be able to provide incentives for technology adoption. For instance, they would say, if you adopt a digital payment option, we would reduce your tax by 0.5%. As an example, now also, if you register as a business because you are a firm, we have created a platform that all firms in Nigeria are being projected. So if I go on that government platform and I'm looking for a firm in Tarabah, I would just search Tarabah, firms, all the firms should come out. How much they generated, the square meter of their firm, how much Yama they produced, what is their shipping and pricing and delivery options. These kind of platforms exist today outside Nigeria, in the UK, because I understand a bit around that economy and the business environment. So there's no business I'm looking for. I would know who is the owner. I would know how much they've generated. I would know how much stuff they have. I would know when they file the last document so that I know that at least business is still ongoing. I can tell, you know, this kind of information needs to be... Oh wow. And in an environment that's where that journey needs to be. And such trade enablement platform needs to be created. Absolutely. We lost a bit of what you were talking about, but you were saying that these solutions already exist in other parts of the world, right? And if we're able to adopt this solution, we can also see that kind of transformation happening here. Yes, because government businesses become more transparent to everyone, which has one of the points I made earlier. So I know all your business dealings. I see you on the government platform. I see the businesses that you're doing. And I'll be willing to want to partner with you. Now today, farmers and their produce, there is no place you can find any data about what they've produced, how many metric tone. But if such a trade platform exists at the point of registration, you can find businesses and the size of their business and do trading easily, which then promotes more SMEs to generate revenue because the market is now integrated. Today, the market is in silos. We need to integrate this SME market so that people are more comfortable producing. People are more comfortable adopting this technology because they know that the bigger picture is that they are visible to everyone, right? So that would be it for me. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, this is an amazing conversation because I'm just hearing you say so many things. And the quickest way for a government to be able to get some of these revenue drive that they're trying to, the IGR that they're trying to generate. I mean, if you incentivize, like you rightly said, at the point of registration, incentivize certain things. It's a no brainer. I remember when Fashula was gonna increase the IGR for, I mean, for taxes, right? When he was driving that point that you needed to pay your taxes. It just needed to incentivize it, right? So a lot of people said I seen the benefits of, so people actually walked into tax offices themselves to submit themselves that they wanted to pay the taxes, not because they really want, but they had seen that every single thing was tied. Even with technology, if you broke a traffic offense or you broke a law in the traffic, they would ask you for your tax clearance. You understand? You know, if you don't have tax clearance, it means that you cannot get your car out of, what's it called, the custody of the law enforcement officers. So there's a lot that can happen. But Jeffrey, I thank you so much because we're gonna continue this conversation. It's definitely not something that we can end. But if you had one thing to say to a small business still struggling in this present age and time to embrace technology, what would you say to that business? What do you have to lose? Just try it. What do you have to lose? If it doesn't work, you shut it down. If it works, good. You've just won. So try it. Abiyo. Yeah, you have nothing to lose. Thank you so much, Jeffrey. All right, thank you so much, Jennifer. Do you have comments? I did, I'll check with you over. All right, so, I mean, thank you so much for watching that. Before we go and show you follow us across all our social media handles that wish you Africa, you can interact with us further. Drop a comment and most importantly, follow all our engagements on social media, like share, invite your families and friends to watch and follow the conversation. If you missed our quotes for today, where is my quote? Here it is. It says, you can't remember my quotes. I'm looking for my quote. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I mean, literally, right? The world has gone very far. If you are this present age and time, you're not embracing technology, trust me, I don't think you will even survive the next three years. I don't think you'll survive the next three years. And thankfully, there are people that are creating this platform for free. You can reach out to Jeffrey, actually. He's on LinkedIn. I'm sure you will find him there on LinkedIn. If you need expertise to teach you what you need to do or how you can start. But the most important thing, you have nothing to lose like he has said. Just start. We'll see you guys on Monday at 8 p.m., as we bring another great conversation to your screen.