Henrii Nwanguma is the CEO of Ekotrafx.Net Limited, an Information Systems and Services company based in Lagos. He studied Information Science and has been active in various spheres of the ICT industry. He started his professional career as an applications software trainer, and has also been involved in major software (user and systems) documentation efforts over the years. He found Ekotrafx.Net Limited which has so far developed ekomoney.net (an electronic payment system) and ekoscholar.net (an online portal for educational resources, electronic communications, and entertainment. He spoke to hilary okeke.
Ekotrafx.Net is an Information Systems company set up to offer a variety of information services. We started off life as a company offering traffic and other related information, but that was not so viable at the time and after 4 years of not gaining momentum, we ventured into something more viable – an electronic payments structure which we are about to launch. We are also building a suite of applications as a starting point to trigger-off wholesale acceptability of this payment infrastructure. We have set a launch date of October, 2009 for everything to be formally presented to the public.
Why Traffic Information Business Not Viable
It has to do with cost. Like I said, the initial direction the company took was to offer traffic information. But we considered short-term viability, cost of deployment versus return on investment over a period of time, and realized it was not a kind of project that one embarks upon without adequate and patient funding. So we decided to put the initiative on hold pending when things stabilize.
Partnership with Government on Traffic Management
We started developing our information service in 2004/05. Over the last 3 months, I understand that the Lagos State Government (in partnership) started something similar, and one of the Internet Service Providers (Swift Broadband if I recall their name) has also done the same. In the case of the government, we suspect that the market they would be looking at will be the security, traffic, and transportation agencies. If it works for them, fine. We see a lot of areas where certainly we can interface with them, but they have gone about their own network in an expensive way. There is room for collaboration, but for us to work with any entity (public or private) as it is right now, we need to have the same kind of focus and goals. Our focus is a commercial, public-facing service; while that of government is for government agencies.
Payment Solutions
One of the major reasons why I came to Telecom/Device forum was to see how I can deepen interactions with my fellow private sector operators, particularly if there is somebody who has a terminal or smart devices that can work conveniently with our system. In that way, expanding what we have and can offer the public. Currently our system works on two platforms namely: mobile phone and Web interfaces. The whole idea is for people to make payments that traditionally would have been very difficult to make in a cost effective manner. We have created interfaces via phone and the Web to make this possible for people. We are talking about the consumer economically making payments as low as N50. Our focus initially will be micro level payments. We want to see how we can synergize with other service providers along the value chain so as to quickly scale our offerings.
Security of Platform
Security is a factor that would facilitate fast and easy adoption of any payment system. Once the man out there does not believe his money is secure, he is not going to adopt your platform. We have seen instances of this in the ATM and debit card segments of the e-payment system; we have seen what sort of fears, what sort of backlash poor security has brought about. What we have done in our case is to build in four layers of security in our solutions. We are running with data encryption, account password and passphrase standards, application security technology – and there is a lot of security built into these. But remember, as long as the user understands that security starts with him/her, we hardly believe that there is any likelihood of security breach along the chain we have created.
