Signage outside Googleplex

Of course, its April Fools Day!

However, GTBank should consider allowing its fans (customers) on Facebook the opportunity to post on their wall. This will allow the fans initiate communication on the fly. Customers, i believe want more than just receiving updates on the CSR activities of the bank. Communication is better when its truly 2-way. This will go a long way in improving the experience.

Well, some recently released statistics show that this might just be true. A research undertaken by Pyramid Research in collaboration with the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), has revealed some interesting facts which I summarise below:

• Nigeria’s telecommunications sector currently accounts for about four per cent of the country’s total gross domestic product (GDP), with room for growth
• This is within the range of what is normally obtainable within the varieties of markets around the world. Apparently, The telecommunications industry can generate anywhere from two to seven per cent and in Nigeria, it is four per cent and it is well within the range that we see in places like Europe, Africa and elsewhere within the developing markets- (Gabriella Baez, Managing Director of Pyramid Research)
• “We are looking beyond the growth of infrastructure to what that infrastructure has done for the common man; how it has impacted lives, what are those socio-economic indices that were positively affected by the growth in the national network… So I think that most Nigerians accept the fact that telecoms has been a major source of empowerment to the ordinary man,” (Ernest Ndukwe, Executive Vice Chairman, NCC)

The impact of the telecom revolution on our society cannot be over-emphasised and its sure to get more interesting considering that the market hasn’t become saturated. I can’t lay my hands on the exact statistics, but I’m sure there’s still a lot of room for growth.

Not to be bothered, my immediate reaction was to determine the veracity of these claims, by going to “www.punchng.com”, I was immediately cut short by this image.

It’s rather disappointing to find our nation’s “most widely read newspaper” as a “greenhouse” for malware. I want to believe that the webmaster/admin for PUNCH has seen this already, and I just hope something is  done to sort this out. We have enough negative labels as a country already.

1. Allows transfers in Euros or Dollars
2. Transfer a maximum of 45 euros
3. Users need a ClickandBuy account to use the app
4. A 5% charge per transaction

This service was designed for small, personal payments (e.g.to be used as a quick way of settling dinner bills, nights out or paying for their share of a gift) and not somewhere to pay your gas or rent in the words of Christian von Hammel-Bonten, senior vice president of ClickandBuy.

This is sure to give a boost to a couple of internet payment ideas (netnaira & fastecash) being tried out in Nigeria. Judging from the number of Nigerian users on the platform (~1 million), a Facebook app extended from either platform and targeted to this class of users is sure to generate good revenues as well as create a bouquet of other Nigerianised services.

I’m sure some people are already thinking…

1. CVV2: It is the 3-digit number at the back of the Verve (Chip & PIN) card.
2. One Time Password (OTP): This is a set of random digits generated from an InterSwitch Token.
3. Challenge: This is a set of numbers that would be displayed on the page for the customer to input on a card reader and get a hashed response to authenticate the transaction.

Snapshot of WebPAY Payment page

This new platform debuts March 8th, 2010 on all existing merchant sites. I dont think the merchants have to make any major changes to their existing logic save for adjustments in the size of the pages where the WebPAY module is loaded. This I believe can be taken care of in html. Now thats all about that for now.

Something else which caught my attention was the growing number of alternatives to the Interswitch platform. This article on webtrendsng.com talks about one of these (in the online payment domain) namely 2checkout. The major pros of this are that it allows you to accepts customer orders via PIN Debit, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, Dinners, JCB, debit cards with the Visa and MasterCard logo, PayPal®, and PayPal Pay Later®. Which means Nigerian based web merchants can direct their services to the international market as well. Secondly, setup fee is just $50 as against the N150, 000 (GTBank charges N75, 000) Interswitch charges for WebPAY.

The con is the transcation fee- 5.5% commission on each transaction plus a $0.45 USD charge per sale. For a transaction containing multiple items, this might not be too impressive.

The migration from magnetic stripe to chip-and-pin has also aided the breakaway from dependency on Interswitch’s platform. Interswitch introduced the Verve solution but not all banks went with it. Some opted for MasterCard (e.g. GTBank Naira MasterCard) while some are on the Visa VPay platform. One downside to this is that one might not be able to use one’s card on every available machine as only banks on a particular network will accept the cards.

Well, i think we can just continue to watch out for further developments (which are bound to come) in this arena…

1. nairaland.com
2. punchng.com
3. vanguardngr.com
4. thisdayonline.com
5. 234next.com
6. sunnewsonline.com
7. gtbank.com
8. ngrguardiannews.com
9. nigeriagalleria.com
10. nigerianbestforum.com

6 sites are newspapers, one is a bank while the remaining 3 are forums. Nairaland the Nigerian internet phenomenon has held onto the 1st position for a long time now. Here’s an excerpt from its review on Alexa’s website:

Christened after the currency of Nigeria- the “Naira”, this site is fast positioning herself to fulfil the Biblical wisdom which says “Money answereth all things”. Nairaland seem to be poised to become the Nigerian encyclopedia of answers. Currently on Page Rank 4 on the search engine giant- Google; type anything related to Nigeria on Google-search and you would be surprised that Nairaland would come up always on the first page of the search results.

I believe it speaks for itself. I just wonder if it will ever get displaced from that position.

Now to the newspapers, my first thought was that they must be losing revenue due to the increase in the number of people who access their content online but looking at it again, I strongly doubt that. Nigeria is blessed with over 150 million residents and a sizeable number of non-residents who still keep a tab with happenings in the country. I was unable to get ‘hit’ statistics, but i’m sure none of the sites is doing a 100million monthly hits. So the online and traditional paper versions exist (comfortably) side by side to meet different needs.

Now I really wonder what GTBank.com is doing on that list. I sincerely hope its not the links embedded in the various scam (interswitch) emails that contribute to these traffic. Lets  hope visitors are in search of information on products/services or using the internet banking facilities or even in search of job opportunities.

I dont know too much about the other sites but i believe they are ‘Nigeria-centric’ portals. Their inclusion on this list implies that more Nigerians are turning to the web for their information needs.

Well, lets just sit back and watch the trend. Its sure to get more interesting…