Eyowo: An Introduction
How do you typically pay for stuff? Bank transfers? Cash? POS? USSD? What are the struggles you deal with when you have to buy something online or at your neighbourhood store when you don’t have cash?
What purpose does your bank serve outside of holding money for you? Why do you even use a bank at all? What frustrations do you have with your bank?
Most of these questions are what Eyowo, a not-so-new payments product (launched July 2018) from tech company Softcom, is trying to answer. Eyowo is a platform that lets people like you and I make payments using just our phone numbers, whether we have a bank account or not. The platform’s website says its services are available via voice, SMS, USSD, a mobile app and a web platform.
On paper, what Eyowo is proposing is quite interesting. In Nigeria, only a reported 41 million bank accounts exist amidst a population of ~191 million people and a giant informal economy. Evidently, banking services aren’t sufficiently inclusive for millions of Nigeria and mobile money is yet to kick off on the scale of say, Ghana.
Given that backdrop, Eyowo is saying from shopping online, sending my mother credit, and buying stuff at the supermarket down the street; to paying my DSTV bill and buying airtime, all I’ll need is my phone number and a mobile phone that doesn’t have to be a smartphone. And there are 174 million active mobile connections in Nigeria, as at June 2019. Interesting, isn’t it?
In other words, Eyowo wants to declutter the purchasing and peer-to-peer money exchange process that currently exists in Nigeria. Similar to PayPal-owned Venmo which relies on an app instead of phone numbers, Eyowo is hinging its ambitions on the personal elements of phone numbers and the social behavior around them, in this market, to catalyse quick adoption.
Of course, doing this will not be easy but if it can pull it off, Eyowo could herald a new approach to financial inclusion much like we’ve never seen in these parts. But can it? Already, it has helped the Federal Government disburse cash incentives to two million Nigerians through the TraderMoni programme.
I was curious to see how the thing worked for myself so I downloaded the app and gave it a go. Setup was a breeze and I was able to add my bank card without much hassle. The weird thing about the Eyowo app is the simplicity of its UI design. There isn’t too much going on, which should be a good thing, but somehow it manages to not be intuitive in actual use. It’s weird.
Admittedly, I haven’t done a lot with Eyowo at the time of writing this but I did try a cardless ATM withdrawal. At the wrong ATM, it’s a bit of a nightmare. At the right ATM however, it’s a different story — I’ll share both stories in the coming week so watch this space. See you then!
