By 2030, eighty percent of the richest Nigerians would have made money from technology. The empires of the future are being built, and this is a cambrian moment of unparalleled age of entrepreneurial capitalism, bigger than what happened in the 1990s when the new generation banks were started. We’re in the application utility decade, passing from the voice telephony decade (2000s) through mobile internet decade (2010s).
By 2025, about ninety percent of the top leading financial institutions in Nigeria will be all tech. The investment bankers in Lagos always write of FUGAZ (First Bank, UBA, GTBank*, Access, Zenith); I always update that to FUSGAZ to include Stanbic IBTC which has a larger market cap than any of UBA, Access and First Bank even though it is “foreign”. So, for that foreign gene in Stanbic IBTC, let us just use FUGAZ.
Today, I have updated a composite which tracks both public and private businesses, looking at the most critical financial institutions in Nigeria. We have GOFIZ which represents GTBank*, OPay, Flutterwave, Interswitch and Zenith Bank. These are the largest (indigenous*) financial institutions with a market cap of at least $1 billion in Nigeria. The most valued financial entity in Nigeria now is OPAY. Interswitch and Flutterwave (each worth $1 billion) are bigger than First Bank, UBA and Access Bank; sure the former duo are private entities while the latter trio are public.
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My tracking system posits that by 2025, in the top 10 financial firms in Nigeria, 90% will be tech-firms. People, your world is changing.
Welcome GOFIZ but this is not certain. I see 3 mutants on the way.
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What I will consider a massive progress by 2030 is if we manage to get 50% of transactions in the land to be done digitally, as against the current less than 5%. That is what we can call real growth, not like the GDP modelling that has consistently failed to account for the actual poverty rate in the land.
We cannot afford to be an economy of fundraising, while the actual growth and wealth distribution continue to disappoint.
The people in their 20s and 30s today will dominate more than half of the transactions in the coming decade, how effective are our initiation mechanisms, to ensure that almost 90% of people in this demography embrace digital transactions?
We have to be deliberate and spend on things that engender future growth, our current trajectory won’t deliver such big numbers, partly because of where the funds are coming from. Those who are into something for the long-term think differently, we need to invest heavily to prepare the younger generation as digital citizens.
Great to know