Wi-Pay Technologies Is now Making Transactions Easy For SMEs

 Ighedo Charles is the vice president, Information Technology Operations at Wi-Pay Technologies Limited, an e-payment solutions company.

He says the company is providing a platform for Nigerians to make transactions in the comfort of their homes. He spoke with Ikechi Nzeako.

What does Wi-Pay Technologies do?

Wi-Pay Technologies is an e-payment solutions company and we are licensed by the Central Bank of Nigeria as payment terminal service provider to major banks in the country and we provide a payment platform.

How do people get on your platform; how do your clients use your platform?

We provide support for PoS for merchants in different locations. So for merchants who require PoS in different locations, retail or small businesses, we work in conjunction with the banks to provide PoS for such merchants. For our mobile apps, people who want to do e-payment, local money transfer, buy airtime, pay bills, they can go to the Wi-Pay website and download our app.

Do users of your service have to pay high fees to access it?

• No, it is free to download our app.
• How old is the company in the county?
• Wi-Pay is four years old in the country.

How has the experience been?

The experience in the country has been both exciting and rewarding.  How has the competition with other companies that provide similar services been?

It is a very competitive space and we take the example laid down by companies that have been operating before us and we rise in situations where they have fallen or not met the expectation of the clients.

We try and satisfy customers where they feel they have not been fully satisfied with the services of the company they previously engaged with.

How will you assess the business environment in the country?

Nigeria is a growing market and payment in the country is such that if you find a need, people will be willing to pay for their need if you meet them at the point of their need. So I believe to a great extent that, may be, the country still has about 67million people who are unbanked.

The unbanked parts of the population are people, who have needs that the e-payment companies have not been able to meet yet. I believe that if we find a way to meet this huge number of people at the point of their need, we will have these people on board using e-payment platform.

There is the issue of low Internet penetration in the country and as an e-payment company; you rely on the Internet to a large extent in your operations. How do you overcome this challenge?

We are very grateful to the GSM (global satellite communications) companies in the country for their equipment and facilities spread across the country. With the availability of data on mobile phones, tablets, computers and other devices, this has provided a great opportunity for us to reach a great number of people in the country ordinarily we will not have access to through the internet. If it were back in the day you had to deploy a V-sat or go to the cyber café to access the internet, it would have been a tougher terrain to navigate. But right now, with the proliferation of mobile networks, it is easier to reach the man in the remotest village in the country the same way it is easy to reach the man in the city.

What type of devices can people use to access your platform?

Presently on mobile devices, for example, you can download our mobile app using an android mobile phone; very soon we will have the Apple’s iOS version of our application ready. You can also access our platform using your normal web browser. As I said before, if you want to pay your bills, just go to the Wi-Pay website.

The power situation in the country is poor and companies in the country are reeling under the impact, how are you overcoming the challenge?

With the poor power situation in the country, part of the things we are leveraging on is keeping our servers in the cloud mostly such that we do not have physical deployment on the ground. We are not impacted by the unavailability of diesel to power our servers to a great extent. I believe that our equipment is battery-powered. This has to a large extent helped to enhance our operations and viability of the company.

In how many cities in the country are you currently operating?

We are currently operating in two cities, which are Lagos and Port Harcourt

What specific policies and programmes do you think government can put in place to make the business environment friendlier for businesses like yours?

Policies to put in place to make the environment less challenging, service providers like us should be allowed to charge more on transactions, may be that could help; there should be policies that commit merchants to using some of the e-payment solutions that are available in the country that will also help to reduce the cost of running business.

What are the challenges that your company has faced in the course of doing the business and have overcome them?

The major challenge here is adoption, adoption in terms of convincing people to migrate from the normal way of doing transactions to the e-payment way of doing transactions. We have been encouraging Nigerians to migrate to the e-payment way of doing business. We have been sharing with them the cost of doing business the normal way relative to doing transactions using the e-payment way.

Take for example payment for DStv subscription, you enter a bus, spend about 30 minutes to their office to make the payment and, probably you want to pay about N3,600. You may spend more than N600 to and fro on transport but if you make use of our e-payment platform, you will only pay N100 convenience fee from the comfort of your home while you are resting. We are encouraging customers to understand that using the e-payment platform is a lot cheaper and convenient than going physically to the bank to make payments.

Where will Wi-Pay be in the next five years?

In the next five years I want to see the company in all parts of the country, especially in rural communities where majority of the unbanked part of the population reside. Our mission is to reach people who are not financially included; we want to reach people in the most remote part of Nigeria and as said at the beginning of the interview, we want to provide them with services that ordinarily meet them at the point of their need, as opposed to dumping technology, which they do not understand, on them.