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Courier Industry Holds Key to Vision 20:2020-Bichi

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Sule Bichi is the managing director, Red Star Express Plc, a licensee of Federal Express Corporation (FEDEX). He is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN) and a member of the Institute of Directors (IoD).
He had a stint with Aminu Ibrahim & Co. before moving to the Board of Internal Revenue in Kano.
Bichi later joined UAC Nigeria Plc as a Management Trainee in 1988 from where he was seconded to Unilever International Audit, and later moved to ICON Ltd (Merchant Bankers) as Treasury Officer before joining Comet Merchant Bank, where he rose to head of Foreign Operations in 1995.
He later worked as Operations Manager with UBA Kaduna South branch from where he joined Red Star Express in 1998 as the Assistant General Manager Finance.
He later became the Executive Director, Finance & Administration; Deputy Managing Director and a member of Finance & Budget Committee. He is also a Director, of the three subsidiaries of Red Star Express. He spoke to peter ugwu on ways to achieve industrial growth in Nigeria.

Building Enterprise like Red Star Express
It has been interesting. First of all, I want to clarify that Red Star is an indigenous company operating under the license of Federal Express Corporation (FEDEX); a US based company which is more than 40 years old.
Red Star is the one that recently celebrated 2 decades of doing business in Nigeria. Building enterprise like Red Star Express in Nigeria is a thing that we expect more of such.
Nigeria’s economy is still evolving and going by the size of the population and resources, it is a country that should have more companies establishing businesses that will help the economy grow.
No doubt, there are teething problems, but we had to rise above that by seizing opportunities that come up in any sector of the economy.
We must start with the development of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) moving to individuals coming together to build mega corporations.
As it is now, our companies are not so big. Very few are playing at the international arena.
So, we need companies that will grow and play in the global economy. That is the only way we can breakthrough and emerge as one of the 20 economies in the world.

Red Star Increase in Turnover In 20 years of Operation
Some people may want to tag it a magic for the company to have achieved that, but it was not a magic. Although considering the industry, it is a growth, because no other courier company in Nigeria has been able to achieve that.
But N5 billion is not that huge when we start placing Red Star against other big companies.
Yes, our philosophy is people-service-profit (PSP). We concentrate more on the people, because they are the ones who deliver the service to customers.
Thus, the turnover is good, but when you change the money to other currencies like the USD or GBP you will discover it is still meagre. So, we are still in the SMEs bloc.
But in Nigeria, you could say it is an achievement owing to the fact that the courier industry is still growing.
There were companies that started same time with us, but have either closed shop or are managing to survive.
We are moving on because we have competent and dedicated workers. They understand the dynamics of the industry and how to create value for the customers.

Consultative Selling Skills Training
Like I said earlier we place emphasis on people right from inception. We not only select competent people from different sectors of the economy, we try to expose them to best trainings.
The Consultative Selling Skills training is just one of the trainings we have for our sales professionals.
We have a functional faculty were we send our people for training. As part of our policies, every staff is expected to clock minimum of 16 hours every year on training.
Staff training is something we cannot do without; it provides platform to re-assess the staff and train them on the trends of practice.
It is part of building the brand. When people are trained and well taken care of it leads to co-operation and productivity.
In all aspects of our business, operations, finance, corporate governance, leadership, we receive training.

Security challenges and Courier Business
Insecurity is highly impacting on every business in the country. Of course you need to take care of your workers.
As a committed firm we have to do all within our powers to ensure our customers, in any part of the country, are safe.
The truth is that we spend more money presently on security; we take extra measures to ensure the workers are not endangered and working with security agents also.
We try as much as possible to observe pronouncements made by the government, because they have full responsibility to secure lives and property in the country.
They know more than we do. In all, we make sure that our people are not exposed to unnecessary dangers.

Innovation In Red Star With The Acquisition Of An Airside Facility
Having an airside facility is another way to facilitate smooth running of our business. We are licensee of FEDEX; a global leader in logistics business and present in more than 220 countries, shipments into Nigeria come through the international airport, so to make it easier and faster for clearing we acquired the airside.
That will facilitate clearing and ensure security is apt. At the same time, it will aid the operations of some government agencies at the port like the customs.

Automation of Red Star Operations, Especially the Newly Acquired Facility
We utilize a lot of ICT components in line with the global practices. From our associate FEDEX we take queue on the use of ICT to facilitate commitments to our customers.
The customer needs to know the whereabouts of his shipment at every point in time. To ensure accountability and disseminating of information, we need to embrace ICT- the internet.
The devices are helpful from time of departure of the cargo from the other end to arrival here in Nigeria, the sorting hub and final delivery to the customer.
 When we place these data on our tracking and tracing facility, our customers can just log onto the website, include the tracking number and have details about a particular shipment.
From our side, we use ICT for faster sorting of the shipment and informing our people on a particular shipment.
We have invested so much in hardware, software and networking. ICT is like a partner in progress; we cannot do our work efficiently without the deployment of ICT.

Handling Phishing of Mails Sometimes Associated with Cargo Tracking
It is our responsibility to safeguard the shipment and information associated with it. Similarly, the customer has the responsibility; when a person gives us parcels for shipment, we generate the tracking number and it is the customer’s responsibility to safeguard it.
Once you key in the tracking number via the internet the status of the shipment will be revealed to you.
In a situation where the customer gives out the number to another person, probably, to help him check, that may amount to compromising the security of that package. It is just like any bank account.

Diversifying Into Passenger Transportation
Our business is on delivering cargo and logistics services. Passenger transportation is not part of our logistics business.
Our big brother, FEDEX, in US has over 675 aircrafts, 99% of those aircrafts are for cargo. For now, our business is logistics and we will concentrate on that.
However, the peculiarity of the Nigerian environment may dictate something different, which I am not ruling out completely.
 
Courier Industry In Nigeria
The industry faces a lot of challenges starting with the running cost to infrastructure. For instance, the condition of roads in the country affects us immensely.
We distribute some of our items by road using heavy duty trucks, vans, lighter vans and motorcycles, the deplorable state of the roads are impacting on our fleet.
The costs of maintaining them, purchase of spare parts are increasing and the life spans are reducing. Secondly, the power supply; the courier companies operate 24hours every day.
So, when people are working you need power, especially since our work with ICT is interwoven, we cannot do without power.
Due to the country’s population for you to be an effective courier company you need to be present in every urban centre. In those areas, you must provide power.
You can imagine the size of back up that we deliver. In some places, the back ups are running more than the national grid.  In that cost of buying generators and powering them is enormous.
Thirdly, the airports; not all airports operate at night. Thus, the state of the aviation industry impacts on our services.
For instance, when we have many aircrafts moving to various locations, especially in the morning and in the evening, we find it easier to put our items on them.
But where we do not have much aircrafts and some of the airports are not operating 24 hours it adds to our costs of doing business and not all airlines are flying to the destinations that we deliver goods and services.
The other aspects of transportation like the railway; although there is a recent development when the Federal Government restored the Lagos-Kano route, now that it has started, we pray that it continues reaching other areas.
As a logistics company that will assist us a lot. These minimize our capacities and put huge constraints on us and increase costs of doing business.

Using International Benchmarks to Assess Nigeria’s Courier Industry
There are reforms that are in the pipeline spearheaded by the Federal Authorities; especially the news I read in your paper on a Bill being given a nod, which is laudable.
 The only thing we are advocating is that, whatever arrangement is made should be in line with the global best practices.
We want to play at the international arena as Nigeria wants to become one of the 20 strongest economies in year 2020. We should have laws that are compatible with that.


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

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InDrive, an e-hailing firm, announced app upgrades as well as new safety details for riders and drivers.

InDrive’s updated Safety Centre now allows its support team to contact a user’s trusted contacts in emergencies and the number of trusted contacts has been increased from one to five. InDrive says that it is also easier for its support team to share information with emergency services, among other things.

Also, the company said by clicking on the app’s SOS-button, users can see all the information needed when requesting help or reporting an incident – along with a button to call police or ambulance services.

InDrive’s app design has also been updated to improve user experience, making the Safety Centre more visible, it said.

Further, the company said: “inDrive is also testing photo sharing and automatic translation of chat messages, which have been added to the in-app chat function. These make it easier for the driver and rider to clarify the pickup point, and communicate in the same language while traveling.

“Passengers and drivers stay within the application when using these features, so there’s no need to use across other platforms, thereby protecting personal information. For now the feature is currently being tested by a limited number of users to improve its functionality before it is rolled out to everyone.”

The announcement today comes after the company recently revealed it had expanded its financing arrangement with General Catalyst to $146 million, allowing the company to engage in product upgrades, extend its service offerings, and enter new markets in Africa.


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NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

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Telecommunications operators in the country are gearing up for another round of disconnections of phone lines for subscribers who have failed to link their National Identification Numbers (NIN) with their SIM cards.

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

The disconnection which will happen Friday, March 29, following a directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) requiring all registered SIMs lacking proper NIN linkage to be either corrected or completely disconnected from networks.

The ongoing process, which commenced on February 28, 2024, is part of the government’s efforts to curb criminal activities like banditry and kidnapping, contributing to enhancing national security.

There are indications of a potential third phase in April 2024.

Operators have reportedly cooperated with the NCC in executing the directive, affirming their commitment to national security objectives and assuring full compliance by the specified deadlines.

The second phase will target subscribers with five or more SIMs from a single operator lacking verified NIN-SIM linkages.

The third phase, set to commence on April 15, will focus on subscribers with four SIMs or fewer and unverified NINs.

While telecom companies seek a review and extension of the April deadline for the third phase, indications from the NCC suggest a steadfast adherence to the established timelines.

The first phase saw the barring of 40 million lines, comprising around 17 million active SIMs without NIN submissions and 23 million inactive SIMs lacking NINs over the past year.

 

 

 

 


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