Swifta (Google Partner)

I have been talking to a couple of FMCG distribution ventures, and they keep lamenting that only some fintech or ERP companies have been able to solve their problems. I am pushing it back now to @SwiftaSystems as a challenge. Maybe they should re-employ me :)

Help my small market. Let your village people enroll as agents.

Late Andy Grove wrote a phenomenal book titled “Only the paranoid survive” and it was our company manual when we restarted @SwiftaSystems. We were obsessed about the future and preferred to be the disruptor rather than the disrupted. We were disrupted once and died. We learned.

@OsOsaGuobadia @pyjama_ceo

The ladies of @SwiftaSystems with one CEO like that 😂

To keep an agent network, telcos typically give them most of their margins in the early days. Over time, this reduces. The agents then start looking for other means to survive. That is where we come in. They dump exclusivity and come to us. A very hard business still. low margins

When you start comparing ATMs and agents, you have lost your damn mind. A well-managed ATM at a great location outperforms any agent for "CASHOUTS." The agent is more than a cashout channel even though they do a lot of it. They are a temporary node to link the network together.

We learned NOT to compete against ATMs but to complement them. Off-site ATMs are as good as the cash in them. If/when the cash runs out, the nearby agent takes over. The preference is always ATM first for cashouts. We decided to use the agent for much more than cashouts.

The first bitter lesson we learned from banks was that the POS was much more effective at serving the agent than phone apps. Even now with USSD, the learning curve is steep. The POS is a monster. It needs low maintenance and very little bandwidth to function. Also portable.

Technology will win. It is a matter of time. Instead of gloating now, let’s evolve models to make agents much more relevant beyond financial services. What @OmniBranch is doing is serving the agents as businesses who can grow and not just as agents forever.

The crazy part was that @kayvz the Product Lead at Twitter who was sitting beside me founded @PeriscopeCo. I was trying to hide my complex. He was soooooo down to earth. I just told myself that these guys are all Billionaires, not just Jack. Maybe @kayvz is even the next Jack?

What I loved was that he was even traveling to more African countries for personal reasons. It made me realize that Twitter has come to stay in Africa. This visit has much more meaning than we imagine. We were looking for mentors, they came to us but we were taking selfies.