Doing More with Less.

Hi everyone, Chidozie here

We’ve been having an important conversation with the market about how SMEs in Nigeria can do more with less — by digitizing their business operations. Even if you are a barbershop and don’t think you need to — you do. As a growing business, there are so many battles you face — acquiring customers, hiring and retaining talent, ensuring consistency in products/services from your vendors and then inject the dreaded “I need a salary advance”. You don’t have the luxury of a large bank balance, a fully-staffed HR department, a sales and marketing department and you certainly are NOT a loan company, yet you are essentially expected to morph into each one of these — hello Superwoman! :-) We don’t think it is fair and we don’t think it is sustainable.

We have seen how tech has transformed the payments space in Nigeria since the introduction of the cashless policy in 2012, and if the recent stats released by NIBSS are anything to go by, the trend is only set to continue with e-payments up 55% year on year. Just as payments in Nigeria have been transformed, we believe business operations can also be, helping business owners to save time and money and do more with less.

At Pay by Verifi, we have been bringing salaries and benefits together in a way never seen before in Nigeria, and as we discussed in the Nairametrics Business Half Hour earlier this week, we help growing companies handle their salaries and benefits at the click of a button. Think salary payments, taxes, pensions, health insurance and salary advances NOT funded by you but funded by a third party loan company. Our cloud-based solution, Pay by Verifi, allows you to power a full “big company system” of salaries and benefits operations from your laptop/tablet, doing more with less, saving money and more importantly, putting a smile on the face of your team.

Tech has helped us in so many ways. Let’s use it as Nigerian business owners to do more with less — it might just be what saves us.