Okojie: Scrum Has Taken a Foothold in Nigeria

The Head, Scrum Master, Patricia Technologies, Ehidiamen Okojie, in this interview, talks about the adoption of Scrum in Nigeria, the financial and Digital payment industry, and the outlook of fintechs in 2023. TECH THIS WEEK presents excerpts.

Patricia Technologies is said to be advancing alternative finance in Africa. What role exactly do you play in Patricia?
Essentially what I do for the Patricia team is head both the product management team as well as a little bit of their engineering team as the head Scrum Master. I’m responsible for making sure that the roadmap for Patricia every single year meets the management’s expectations in terms of delivering features and functionalities on the products that we have. Over the years, we’ve been able to deliver different features and functionalities on our current consumer product, which is the Patricia app, where our customers are able to carry out their financial transactions, not just on the crypto side of things because as you know, we play a lot in the crypto space, but we also allow them to be able to pay their bills, do certain financial transactions on our legacy.

Currently, I have a very lean team. We’re responsible for building new versions of our consumer app currently, as we speak. We will be going live with a new version of the app very soon. This new app provides our customers the opportunity to play with more tokens. Currently, we only do two tokens but with this new feature and version of the app, customers can do more than two tokens which will be about four tokens and will be able to do more things like swap, buy and then sell. Essentially, that’s what I do for Patricia. I manage the products and make sure the product, the features and functionalities are delivered on time in terms of making sure our customers are always happy, access to the app and availability is at its highest point so that there is no downtime and then Patricia can continue to be a going concern in terms of processing new transactions.

Could you tell us a bit about Scrum? Does it have a future in Nigeria, and is it something to be embraced?
Scrum is a methodology of managing Agile projects. In the past, people would do the waterfall style of project management. What that means is that you do not receive value for your product until the end of the project. However, Scrum as a methodology allows you to receive incremental value for your product on a biweekly basis or monthly basis. That methodology breaks up your entire product and project into chunks, and those chunks for every release are called iterations.

For every iteration, you are receiving value every single time as opposed to in the past, where you would have a product or project release that could span twelve months. And in today’s technology or digital space, you cannot afford to wait twelve months because time to market is key. By the time you wait for 12 months, your competitors have released several versions of their products over time, and then you are just coming with the very first version.
Scrum has taken a foothold in Nigeria, and this is due to the fact that if you look at our fintech and digital space, using a typical example in Nigeria today, you can count over ten different payment apps today in Nigeria, providing the same kind of service. The reason why that is happening is because fintechs have started to embrace the scrum style of project management that allows them to release their products. There is no fintech in Nigeria today that wants to survive, that is truly in it to do business that does not adopt that strong style of project management or agile project management because it works on the principle that you only need a very lean team, just a small team to grow a product and make it scale.

What other projects have you worked on?
Aside from working with Patricia, I am also the head product manager at Clever money. One of the things that makes me happy is the kind of value I provide. One that resonates so much with me is the creation of Access bank’s digital banking platform. I played a pivotal role in creating access bank’s current mobile banking app, ATM product design and Internet banking app. I am so proud because, before that time, I knew where the banks’ channels were at that point in time. We were one of the first people to create an omnichannel banking app. In fact, access bank today, because of that project that I was on, was able to build the very first digital bank in Nigeria.
After this was done, I went ahead to help Access Bank with the merger with Diamond bank. I was also responsible for merging and integrating those two systems. It was a thing of joy for me because I found myself doing something that was extremely important to the bank, and at the end of the day, the result shows in their bottom line. I built the foundation they are using on the mobile app, the ATMs, internet banking and they are still building on what I have done, that makes me extremely proud.

Clever money is also a fintech that is dear to my heart. It is a startup that started a couple of years ago. I have been able to help them build their products to make them more acceptable in the market. They have an agency banking product which allows customers to have access to payment solutions anywhere in Nigeria from the use of a POS terminal in which you can withdraw money, deposit money, transfer money, and pay bills. I have been able to help them set up, help drive their sales, and help them drive their business to where it is today.

What are the key events that will shape the Fintech space in 2023?
Presently, there are a lot of payment applications. Everybody is building a payment application. So, what I see happening is the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) might have to step in again to do something like what they did to banks a couple of years ago when they told them to either consolidate or close shop because there were too many banks at that time. I foresee the same thing happening where CBN would say, ‘Guys, you have too many payment apps. I know you are doing fantastic work however, we want this space to be more efficient, so we need you to consolidate. Any fintech that does not have a valuation of a certain amount of money can partner with several fintechs around to see how you can consolidate your valuation’. We would see consolidation of several fintechs happening in Nigeria. That is what I envisage.

Also, people need to start looking at seeing players in the real estate market using technology now. Up until now, there has not really been a solution that provides customers or users an ability to buy real estate comfortably and safely. What you would see happening are products that provide customers an ability to buy property on an app. Some of these real estate companies might pivot to becoming proptechs. They have been doing it the traditional way. They will infuse technology and the moment they take that decision, I can guarantee you the result would be 10X because people would be more comfortable because the young community we have in Nigeria are so tech savvy. Anything that does not make their life easy, they walk away from. So that is going to happen this year as well.

What can be done to increase the trust quotient regarding digital payments and innovations?
As a country, we are not teaching about the digital space well enough. We can say thank God for COVID-19, a lot of innovations came out where people were able to learn things online, but I feel today in our schools, we are not training our young kids enough about the opportunities in the tech space. We are also not trying to push the message of the ease of doing business with technology. What should ideally be happening is there should be more collaborations in our digital space, looking for initiatives to push the message further into the county to say there are so many things we can do with technology. For us to still work with what we have to increase that trust quotient, it is important that businesses tap into whatever opportunities they get to be able to teach people what they can do in that space.

At Patricia today, we have a version of a feature on our product that teaches people about the innovations in the space, what they can do in the space and the opportunities available. If other businesses can replicate the same and make it a culture to constantly preach the gospel of digital transformation in Nigeria, I believe that the trust quotient would go up. Cybercriminals will always be here. However, if you are equipped with the right kind of information, you will know the pros and the cons so as not to get burnt.

There’s a lot of competition in your space. What are you doing differently?
Competition is good and healthy; it keeps everybody on their toes. However, trust is going to be a growing concern. It is important that your users trust you. They want to be able to go to bed at night, wake up in the morning and still have their assets, their money, their fiat in the same place they left it in your custody. So, building on that trust of your customers requires you always being on your toes in terms of protecting their interest. Cyberbullies do not sleep, so constantly we are innovating ways to protect our customers.

Today, we have something called two-factor authentication, you are unable to do transactions without two-factor verification. I would not advise anybody to download a financial app that does not offer two-factor verification because it is the most basic type of protection you can give your customers. We are also integrating authentication apps which give codes and token numbers.
What we are doing differently at Patricia and Clever money is to build on securing the interest of our customers. If our customers are confident that their assets and data in our care are safe, they will constantly come back.
Secondly, I will say stability. We are building a stable system. There is

no system that is 100 per cent without issues, but even when those issues happen, we immediately make sure we come back to our customers and say we have something we are working on, and you may not be able to have access to your asset, but we would be back. How many times in a month or how stable is your product to your customer? Does it break down every other day? So, building a stable product is what we are doing differently. We make sure we constantly monitor around the clock to make sure we are catching these things early and dealing with them.

The tech sector has continued to get slammed in 2023. Last year wasn’t a fantastic year for a lot of fintech companies. What are your projections for the fintech space in terms of layoffs this year?
Unfortunately, a lot of people would not want to hear this, but there would be a lot of layoffs this year. The reason for that is not just because of the economy, even though it has a major part to play, but some of these companies do not think through their roadmap. Coinbase, which is a major player in the cryptocurrency space, laid of 20 per cent of their staff, why? It is not just because the market is bearish, it is because, despite the fact that they might have a lean team, it is not giving them the value they want to see so why keep those people? 

They would rather work with the small people that give them the most amount of value. There will be more layoffs this year and the reason some of these things are happening is because there has been a trend where some people just want to have startups, work through a few months of transactions and then go and get seed money in dollars. So, most of those guys don’t have the right discipline or the right focus to keep those companies as growing concerns. Most of them are thinking about the end but they do not want to justify the means. So, what happened to most of those fintechs that laid off or closed up is they projected they were going to hit people with a fantastic product and make money but when they did not get that money, they were unable to continue.
The only ones who will continue to remain relevant are those who are willing to take those tough decisions, figure out the trajectory to know if they will be profitable or not by the end of the year and make those cuts now. You will start to see a lot of cuts not just in the cryptocurrency space but in those payment apps that you are seeing today. You would also start to see cuts in personnel and resources as well.