Uzoma Dozie is one of Nigeria’s leaders in the financial sector and was the last Group Managing Director of Diamond Bank, Nigeria.
During his tenure at Diamond Bank, Uzoma was responsible for overseeing the Corporate and Commercial arms of the bank, grew the Retail Banking arm to 18M customers and oversaw the successful merger with Access Bank in April 2019. This resulted in the new institution becoming Africa’s largest bank with 29m customers.
Post-Diamond Bank, many speculated what his next steps might be. Not one to take the traditional route – which might have been to accept a role heading up an international institution, he instead announced last week that he is launching his own technology company, based out of Lagos.
For those in the know, Uzoma’s name is synonymous with retail and technology – which is why it might not have come as a surprise when he unveiled his new company, Sparkle, a first-of-its-kind mobile-first platform, which will use technology to support and grow an entire community, in its millions, of retailers across the continent. He is also no stranger to the tech community, having run the Lagos-based angel investment and mentorship platform, Black-Knights as well as curating and hosting the tech-focussed TV show TechTurks, where he interviews Nigeria’s leading entrepreneurs and digital pioneers.
I caught up with Uzoma and asked him about his move from Diamond Bank, the launch of his new venture, and how he will use technology to build the retail market in Nigeria.
You oversaw the merger of Diamond Bank and Access Bank in April – whilst many might have moved in to a Boardroom career, you are moving into start-up life – why now?
I will counter that question with why not? Throughout my career in banking and financial services, I’ve been focussed on and passionate about how technology can be leveraged to affect change, at scale, in the finance and business sectors. At Diamond Bank, we grew our mobile app users from a little over 204,000 in 2014, to 3.3M by the end of 2018. It took us almost 20 years to generate the same customer numbers via our network of branches. Technology helps us to scale efficiently, quickly and cheaply – therefore opening up the market for so many more people who are currently excluded from the financial system.
This is why I decided not to sit back and lurk around boardrooms after I completed the Diamond Bank and Access Bank merger – I wanted to build on my 30+ years of banking and industry experience, combine it with my love and fascination of technology, and build a digital-first business from the bottom up.
Give us an overview of what Sparkle is and what it hopes to achieve in the market
Sparkle is a mobile-first digital platform focussed on supporting and growing Nigeria’s retail sector. We are using machine learning and artificial intelligence to help our users make better informed business decisions, as well as to help engage those who are stuck in the informal economy, and assist them as they work towards financial inclusion and financial freedom. Trust and transparency underpins everything we do with Sparkle, as we look to build a business for the many, and not the few.
We are currently still in the product development stage, however with Sparkle we are building customer experience-led functions around savings, lending, automated inventory and asset management, and we are also developing tools to help users register their companies, register for tax and even domains. An important part of our ethos is that we want to bring more people into the “system” and plug the gap in terms of business advisory and regulatory services for retail SMEs in the country. These are services that do not currently exist under one roof for retailers.
You are known for pioneering the retail banking space in Nigeria through your leadership at Diamond Bank – what are the challenges retailers face, in your opinion?
Retail is changing. It now has no fixed abode. It’s on Instagram. It’s on Facebook. And the challenge retailers are facing is that banks are mostly ill-equipped to deal with the instant nature of digital commerce, that will soon dominate the Nigerian retail market.
As has typically been the case, retailers looking to “bank” will have a customer relationship manager who will advise them on certain financial services or decisions. The challenge lies in the fact that you need to have a certain degree of “purchase” with the bank in order for you to access these face-to-face services. What we are doing is working with smaller retailers and individuals; those who make up the backbone of retail across Nigeria, to remove the need of personal interaction and personal relationships, in order to access financial support services. Sparkle is here for all. We are building and growing a community of people who want fast, accurate decisions made based on unambiguous and unbiased data habits, by removing emotion from decision making and put the data in our users’ hands. If you need a loan, the data round your business will assist with this, and not flawed human decision making.
How does Sparkle differ from services that more traditional banks provide?
What we want to do with Sparkle is to tackle how retailers can achieve their daily business objectives and scale their companies – using their apparatus of choice – the mobile phone.
Sparkle isn’t a bank; and it isn’t a fintech platform in the traditional sense, although we do provide financial services via technology. Why? Because we know that our customers are on mobile – they are digital natives and digital aliens. They are building their ecommerce sites on their mobile phones, they are connecting with their customers [current and potential] on social, via mobile, they may already be trying to do their banking via their mobile phones. Mobile first, second, third. So we have built Sparkle as a wrap around to service their business requirements.
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Traditional banks are more accustomed to dealing with larger retail customers. At Diamond Bank, we built out a retail arm of the bank that included over 15Mpeople, in less than 10 years, using technology and building financial products and services designed specifically for retail customers. This was very much a “new” approach to servicing retail in Nigeria. Sparkle is using this thesis, but focussing our attention on a different market segment, and also looking at how we can scale and support the unbanked and financially excluded in Nigeria. It’s an exciting time for retail in Nigeria, and Sparkle is amassing a tribe of like-minded people, self-starters and problem solvers who are dedicated to using their talents to power the digital transformation of the financial industry. It is by no means a quick-fix solution, but we are committed to solving the unique and complex, changing needs of the Nigerian market.