Electronic Payplus Limited (Epayplus), a Lagos-based smart card and payment solutions service provider says it saves each of its 13 banks clients an average of N2 billion annually, its chief executive officer (CEO), Bayo Adeokun told BusinessDay in an exclusive interview.
“Averagely today, we can say we have saved each of our banking customer about N2billion. The Federal Government of Nigeria through the minister of finance and customs increased tariffs from 10 percent to 65 percent, if that is the case, banks would have probably been buying the cards at a very exorbitant rate and then would have been selling to their customers at a price higher than the N1000 that it is paid for,” Adeokun revealed.
In the wake of increased demand for forex (FX), the company succeeded in helping banks save lots of Foreign Exchange outflows from Africa’s biggest economy as it manufactures cards locally for financial institutions compared to when the cards were imported.
In Nigeria today, Epayplus share of the smart card, payment solution service market of 6 operators is about 42 percent. When the company started its smart card business nine years ago in Nigeria they were the 6th, but now they are the second biggest in terms of market share, “the biggest is about 2-3 percent bigger than us,” the CEO said.
Epayplus decided to do a backward integration and went into local milling and embedding of smart card in Nigeria. “We had to invest in new machineries, we had to invest in people and we had to invest in training the people that we just employed for that service. We started that as a Contact card that is a card that you insert into POS or ATM which is what majority of the banks in Nigeria issue today,” the CEO said.
Some of its partners are Interswitch, Verve, AustriaCard, Emerging Markets Payments (EMP), Kona International (kona i), Future Card, Unified Payments, Matica Technologies, Gemalto, Screen Check, Jinguan Group, and Entrust Datacard.
“However, recently the card association, MasterCard precisely came up with a policy that beginning from 2019 all their cards that will be issued in the African market will be contactless cards that you need not insert into the ATM or POS but you just tap. We envisage this and working together with one of our banking partners, we then decided to invest in embedded contactless,” he said.
Electronic Payplus Limited commenced operations in 2005 with POS terminal deployment and changed its line of business to Smart card production and personalization in 2009. It currently has an installed capacity of 12 million cards per annum.
“If you look at the total volume of banking cards in Nigeria, it is just about 15 million per annum so having 12 million; I can say it is very sufficient. However, we are working with the government as we also produce the National Identity Card and we are the only company that has done that and what we are trying to do is to produce them locally for the federal government. We are going to expand the capacity very soon,” the CEO told BusinessDay exclusively.
…expect full interview in BusinessDay soon
