After leaving a senior position within the UK to pursue entrepreneurship in Nigeria, Peter Atuma now chairs a number of firms, together with Princeps Credit Systems Limited and Tango Brook Technologies. He tells Vanessa Obioha about his entrepreneurial journey, enterprise philosophy and the technological options he believes can strengthen monetary safety in Nigeria
“Just give me two minutes,” Peter Atuma pleads as he walks into his workplace within the Ikeja-Alausa enterprise district of Lagos. Usually punctual, he has been held up by an impromptu assembly on this cloudy morning. Dressed in a blue enterprise go well with, he seems each bit the chief he has grown into. His neatly trimmed hair is flecked with gray on the sides, his strides purposeful and his composure commanding.
True to his phrase, two minutes later, I’m ushered into his spacious workplace, furnished with minimalist, understated magnificence. Even the open cabinets are uncluttered, displaying solely a handful of awards. His choice for house, I uncover, just isn’t a current improvement. It dates again to childhood, however it additionally affords a glimpse into how his thoughts works.
“I really prefer to have a bit of space so I can think properly,” he explains. “That’s why we have people whose minds are good grounds for big thoughts. They like to clear rubbish or noisy thoughts out of their minds. You would hear people talk about signals versus noise. When you let the noise crowd your mind, you can’t really have the space to get productive thoughts out. So we like to clear that rubbish out of the way.”
As he speaks, the impression of a person pushed by function turns into extra obvious. Atuma’s profession spans greater than 30 years in finance and IT. He started at Nigerian Industrial Development Bank (NIDB) Trustees Ltd., the place he labored from 1992 to 1998, earlier than transferring on to roles at outstanding UK-based companies, together with Morgan Stanley, EC Harris (now Arcadis), and Telecity Group (later acquired by Equinix). From 2013 to 2020, he served as Global Head of Information Security Governance at Equinix Inc., overseeing groups throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific.
But after years of working within the UK, he ultimately determined to take a unique path. In 2020, through the COVID-19 pandemic, he resigned from Equinix and returned to Nigeria to pursue entrepreneurship. The determination marked a brand new chapter in a profession that had geared up him with appreciable expertise in finance, know-how and organisational management.
Equinix, he says, was significantly influential in shaping his understanding of organisational tradition, classes he would later carry into his personal companies.
“I was so into the culture there that I knew that I couldn’t let it go. Even when I started my business, I still carried a lot of those cultures into my businesses, and I see the same kind of result in terms of the progress that I saw in Equinix.”
Among the rules he carried with him have been assuming constructive intent in colleagues, bringing constructive vitality to the office, and inspiring workers to talk up and take initiative. He believes these practices foster innovation and inclusion, permitting folks to contribute meaningfully to an organisation’s development.
At the primary anniversary of Tango Brook Technologies, the vitality know-how and intelligence firm he chairs, Atuma spoke about how an concept he conceived greater than 30 years in the past had lastly grow to be a actuality. The drawback was acquainted to people and companies that purchase gas: inconsistencies in gas receipts and the issue of sustaining dependable data of purchases throughout filling stations.
The concept first occurred to him in 1992, throughout his National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) yr. At the time, he had no clear means of turning it right into a workable resolution. Today, the Tango Fuel app affords a technique to handle the issue, bringing an previous ambition inside attain. Seeing the thought take form nonetheless strikes him.
“At the time, I didn’t know how it was going to come to fruition because of the vast limitations. Technology and connectivity were not really as we have them today. In fact, we didn’t even have cards for payments three decades ago, so it was just difficult to deal with the problem. And I thought, how could companies just live on continually with problems?”
The query captures a central tenet of Atuma’s lifestyle and enterprise. He just isn’t one to simply accept issues or shortcomings as inevitable. He prefers to determine them and discover methods to handle them. In the case of Tango Brook, the answer took many years to materialise, however the delay didn’t diminish his resolve.
Nor does he imagine that Nigeria’s tempo of innovation is essentially gradual. On the opposite, he sees appreciable ingenuity amongst Nigerians and believes that options are doable, even when the circumstances for growing them are usually not but in place.
“One may say that certain solutions may require certain kinds of ecosystems to be aligned, or some connectivity or infrastructure to be in place, but then you keep your eyes open for those moments. And sometimes what we do is drive the introduction of those ecosystems, or infrastructure, or whatever it is in the ecosystem that will make that happen, to either contribute personally or at least be aware when they are coming up, so that you can take advantage of those environments to create solutions. I don’t think that we should put up with the thought that solutions will come from some planet, some other planet,” he says.
For Atuma, the flexibility to develop homegrown options is not an aspiration. It is already taking place. The Tango platform, he notes, was constructed by Nigerians in Nigeria. He additionally sees alternatives for the enterprise to increase past the nation.
The Nigeria Atuma grew up in has modified significantly over the previous three many years. During his early profession, automated teller machines, cost playing cards and cellular units able to facilitating digital transactions weren’t a part of on a regular basis monetary life. Technology has since reworked how folks entry cash and conduct enterprise, however some elementary challenges stay.
One is identification verification, an space by which he believes the monetary system nonetheless has vital gaps.
“We still have a lot of people who don’t have BVN, for example,” he says. “Millions of people in Nigeria still don’t have BVN. What that just means is that they are excluded from access to funds.”
Another concern is the authorisation of monetary transactions, significantly when massive sums are concerned. Atuma factors to the continued reliance by some banks on scanned signatures as a possible vulnerability.
“For instance, in Nigeria at present, you’ve gotten this loopy scenario the place many of the banks could have a specimen of a signature for executives, after which they settle for as authorisation, plenty of instances, scanned signatures. If you’ve gotten a fraudulent govt assistant, for instance, who has entry to your digital signature and has studied your behaviour, figuring out the way you connect these items, perhaps it’s the govt who really attaches these signatures to letters that may transfer enormous sums of cash. They simply append the digital signature to the doc, and plenty of instances the financial institution honours it, even until at present.
“Some will say they go the extra mile of making a phone call to that executive. Hey, we’re in the days of AI. Your voice can also be cloned. There are clever ways of doing these things. We have to start to think differently.”
To handle this vulnerability, Atuma says he has a patented biometric digital signature resolution in Nigeria. The know-how, he explains, would allow an govt to authenticate a signature by biometrics slightly than counting on a scanned picture, no matter their location.
“No matter where the executive is in the world, rather than accepting some scanned signature as a signature, you can then have a live signature on the back of the biometrics of the executive such that wherever he is in the world, it splashes out a particular signature in a way that can be verified that it’s from his biometrics.”
The resolution is already in use at Princeps Credit Systems Limited, a client lending firm he chairs. Atuma says the corporate has disbursed greater than N25 billion this yr, attributing its excessive assortment charges to a few core rules: seamless identification verification, affordability checks and salary-source collections by the Workers Aggregated Credit Scheme (WACS) and Deduct.
For all his enthusiasm for technological innovation, nevertheless, Atuma doesn’t imagine that progress ought to come on the expense of the human relationships that after outlined enterprise.
Having began his profession in banking, he remembers a time when buyer relationships have been constructed on a deeper understanding of individuals’s wants and companies. Bankers, he says, typically took the time to know how their prospects operated and provided help past particular person transactions.
“Back then, the bankers got to know the customers more intimately. They had relationships where the bankers took time out to understand the businesses of their customers and help them. Today, it’s about transactions more than anything else. We don’t even know the business that they are in and how they do their business as much as we used to do back then. So sometimes we miss those fundamentals in today’s world, and I think that technology shouldn’t replace those fundamentals, but strengthen them.”
It is a precept that extends to how he builds and manages his personal companies. Atuma believes that folks stay an important ingredient in entrepreneurial success.
“There are certain elements that are combined to produce success in business. You have the people, process, technology, and product. A combination of all of these would produce success, but I always like to start with people. Without the people, your process would be useless,” he says with amusing.
For Atuma, entrepreneurship is all about folks and prospects, and a willingness to be taught from failure.
“Failures can be avoided. Once you know the art of success, you can avoid failures,” he concludes.
