How Nigeria’s Fintech Ecosystems Went Fully Remote

No interesting time to be in Nigeria other than now.

Prior to the Covid-19 era, the nation’s Information Technology sector has been wombling and crawling to becoming a full-fledged remote work nation. Mere suggesting to the management always fell on deaf ears.

The management kicked against the initiatives with all their energies as if developers were looking for an occasion to boycott work altogether. They were proved wrong. The excuse they gave was always around security concerns of the managements’ assets and infrastructures.

Meanwhile, the management soon realized the importance of the shift in thinking. However, there were a handful of Fintech companies that went fully remote. Chief among them was Interswitch, a payment fintech firm. And other startups.

The Covid-19 outbreak changed the landscape! The pandemic degenerations resulted in a total locked-down of the entire nation for weeks. Prior to this, preparations were geared to keep the nations’ banking sectors and IT firms running while this lasted.

How?

The management summoned the network guys for a way out. Finally, the Virtual Private Network remote tool was downloaded and installed on each developer’s personal laptop. And off we go. We joined the league of developed nations that went fully remote!

Developers have their ways eventually. Thanks to the Covid-19. Perhaps Nigeria would have still been operating in the dark age.

Following the wake was the evolution of the Azure DevOps tool adoption by many Banks in Nigeria for collaborations. My bank, where I work, equally bought into the DevOps tool to track and monitor developers' projects stored in the remote repository. This is a powerful enabler for my bank to be agile and compete favourably in the Fintech market today.

The wake of the Covid-19 pandemic has been two edged-sword for most of the developing nation. Sadly, while we mourned those we have lost to the virus, we equally benefitted from the technological evolutions that it sparked off.

My next blog post is around the challenge of Software Developers in Nigeria:Focussing on the following key areas:

• Azure DevOps new learning curve
• Data bundle subscriptions cost
• Power Supply Demands and Overhead cost
• Vast Learning curve
• Monk Solitary life Evolution, burn out
• Increase Need for Collaborations
• Overburdened Projects Standup meetings