I explained in a video today that Nigeria has three core investment opportunities for entrepreneurs [there are many others but I focused on the small pocket manageable areas]. I have gotten some emails with people asking me to offer more use cases. Sure, I try to keep the videos short as many in Nigeria spend money when they watch. That means you cannot really say a lot if you want people to watch.
Specifically on the financial services one, besides the race to partner with banks, I see massive opportunities with airlines in Nigeria. And that means Air Peace and Arik and soon JetWest (which will be the best airline in Nigeria when my big kinsman takes it live).
If you help these entities to improve their airline mileage royalty programs, you can mine the most lucrative customer segment in Nigeria and offer services like insurance, real estate, etc to those customers. Indeed, you can build a solid financial product using data from the airline royalty programs. It is not only banks that have customer data. The airlines have the best customers and you can deepen your business in partnership with them.
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But to do that, you must have a vision on what to do with data. Fintech, insuretech, etc must not be seen from the lens of banking and insurance partnerships alone. There are many tangential sectors which are there. Working with them to clean up their data and improve data collection could unlock more value.
Our airline sector remains at infancy. While leasing aircraft would be hard, working with them to deliver services to their customers is promising for entrepreneurs. If you pay money to most airlines in Nigeria to manage their royalty programs and monetize the associated data, you could build a solid business. Think of Jason Njoku going to Nollywood to buy the rights of videos for iROKOtv. The videos for airlines are those customer data which they collect but have largely not seen any value besides moving customers from one airport to another. Under the right customer privacy policy, those customers would be happy to be served besides just buying tickets and flying.
I do not work on financial services because it is the largest sector in my practice: you cannot compete with people that put eba and amala on the table. But entrepreneurs there, discover the latent opportunities – the sector is huge. There are new frontiers with latent but promising opportunities across industrial sectors in Nigeria. Go for them.
Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously shouted “water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink“, we have at the moment ‘data, data, everywhere but no one is using it”. We need to change that in Nigeria.
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