Thank you very much everyone. Okay. So while my slides are coming up, I should first of all thank Pastor Pu. Where's Pastor Pujo, please? I want to thank Pastor Puadro for organizing this. Of course, I don't think he knows this, but I used to attend Covenant Christian Center. Yes. And in the early days when I was conceiving Money Point, I used to come to his service in Lagon restaurant. He's still in Lagon restaurant. And I found pastor to be one of the few men of God that had a fantastic balance between spirituality and sound judgment and wisdom. And just like many of you are sitting down here, I used to sit in the congregation, sneak in, sneak out because I was in the depths of rumination of what I wanted to do in my life. I used to live in Leki then and I made a mental note that one day pastor Joe called me to the platform. And so when John said it, I got it. So normally I don't even attend these events. So when he reached out, I just told my wife I have blown. So thank you very much Mr. Pas. You're a blessing to generation. I would say many of your teachings those days formed many of the business mentalities I have today on how to run a great, a big organization like Moneypoint has transformed. I am proud to say money started from scratch when I and my co-founder Felix started in 2015, purely Nigerian. Everything we done in Money Point today is purely, purely Nigerian. I was born in Lagos. I grew up in Ibadan and I remember when I came to Lagos the first time, took a bus from Ibadan or was it Ife because I schooled in OAU. Great Ife. Great Ife. You know how we represent, right? So I took a bus and I landed in Oja, that was my I think first time in Lagos and that was in 2007. So he's a your small boy is now you know the founder of a unicorn. So everyone of you here just know it's possible. I would tell you some of the teachings that I have learned along the way. Many of them are I'm hoping maybe it's not too advanced. I'm hoping that it's not too theoretical. I'm hoping you note them down and just use the formal model of how you run an organization and how you create something big. But my Lagos story is when I landed in Lagos and I saw the chaos in Lagos. Imagine all those bound downful bosses. If you have lived in Ibadan before, raise up your hand. Now coming from Ibadan to where everything is calm, cool. You take a bus, they wait for you. You slowly mo them to one in which if you don't get that now, they will just drive off and you fall. I knew in this life I had to make it as I'm coming to Lagos. So when I landed in Lagos, I fortunately got a job with Interswitch and in Interswitch I met my co-founder, I met my wife. I was initially a software engineer, became a product manager. I think I just briefly said I met my wife, right? Okay. So, I became a product manager. But I had always had it in my mind that I was going to create something big and initially I thought I was going to create like a hardware company. Along the way, I realized that there's this country in this side of the world called China that is going to beat the world in hardware. So I stopped my hardware dreams and focused on software and that's why I joined Interswitch fortunately and the vision, the reason why I joined Interswitch is because I felt like I needed to stand on the shoulder of a giant for you to be able to see the state of the art and then launch from there and fortunately Interswitch taught me and my co-founders many of the things that we needed to learn to be able to proceed and ride from where Interswitch is taking the industry to. So please where are my slides? All right, beautiful. So today that small company that we have done is Africa's leading payment infrastructure where we process eight out of 10 transactions today offline today. Today we have about 6 million businesses on our platform and roughly about 10 million personal customers on our platform. Revenue wise, we're top six in Nigerian banking industry and we processed last year 14 billion transactions in count and these transactions were worth 500 trillion in value. We also dispersed one trillion of loans last year to businesses. And we are number one, we're the largest merchant acquirer in Africa. We've raised $200 million of equity from foreign investors and most of it have been invested into Nigeria. And today according to Financial Times we're the fastest growing fintech company three times in a row. We employ 5,000 employees across 17 countries. And in all this, I want to tell you that ideas are free. If you have an idea in your mind right now, I think you've heard other people say it, scratch it. It's nothing. It's nothing and it's not waiting for you. Execution is everything. As a matter of fact, if anybody comes to me and say, 'There's this idea that I have and I want to come and share it with you.' I don't respond to the person. It means nothing because it's a dime a dozen. You need to pick that idea and actually execute it. Now I will go beyond ideas and how you know execution, I actually tell you about the biggest challenge that you have is you. I'll focus on you and how you need to think generally because the biggest problem of an entrepreneur is yourself. When you conquer yourself, you conquer the world. The biggest battle are internal battles that you have. As an entrepreneur, one of the biggest challenges that you have is anxiety. Even as you're no longer, you are not yet an entrepreneur that you're just starting, you realize that the biggest challenges that you generally have is being able to keep a calm mind all the time to be able to get to where you want to get to. So you figuring out yourself requires you to have a mental model that is shaped by reality, that is shaped by the word of God and that is also shaped by what works. So as an entrepreneur, one of the first thing that you need to make sure that you have are your goals. You need to ensure that you get these seven things I'm about to tell you right. If you get these seven things right, you would have formed a mental model in your mind that can allow you to be able to take everything that comes your way. The first thing is goals. A lot of you have things that you want to do. But if those things cannot become numbers that are written down, it's nothing. Honestly, it's just vibes and you forget about it. You've heard different testimonies people have had that they had something and they wrote it down somewhere and they put it there. And I remember in the founding days of Money Point, that number for me was $100 million. When I was recruiting many of my early founders, the pitch I was giving to all of them was please come and work for Money Point and if you work for Money Point I'll give you 1% of Money Point and 1% of Money Point will be worth $1 million. That's the number I had and I wasn't working extra hard because I need, I was going to make myself rich, I was working extra hard because I felt like I had an obligation to all the people I have asked to join me. Many of these people were first class students from Unilag. Some of them had the ability to travel out there. And here was I one young boy. I was in my early 30s. Good job. You're in your 33. So I was in my early, I was in 29 and I was actually asking that you come and join me and come and work on Money Point. And you had the opportunity of working for superior companies at that time and I knew that the best people had multiple opportunities. So I had to give them a pitch. The pitch to all of them is just come and work for Money Point. They saw the vision, they saw the passion, they felt like okay we are young, we can take a chance here even if it doesn't work out we'll bail out and go and work somewhere else. So but that number for me was just a hundred million. And I want to encourage everybody that if you have something at the back of your mind for you to be here, this interests you, you need to write that number down. What is it? If you don't set goals in a larger organization also the organization begins to move in any direction that you don't want. People work with vibes. People work with no particular direction in mind. In an organization like Money Point with 5,000 employees you can imagine how hard it is to be able to now set a direction for everybody to move when you're even especially remote, even if you're not remote how many people can you see one by one. So everybody you need to set clear goals in your mind and that's what Auntie said also, numbers. What are those numbers? Your revenue goal, your market share goal, number of customers, gross profit, contribution margin, cash flow, profit, profit before tax, profit after tax. If you don't do these numbers, go and know it. It's not advanced anything. You cannot set a business that is for profit and not have clarity of where you want to get to. So that's the first thing you need to set. You need to know what does winning look like, if you don't have it's just a dream. If you don't set those numbers now, when you set the numbers, you now need to set out a structure. You see, one of the reasons why Money Point blew when we blew as we blew is the structure that we created in distributing our products. We created a structure in which just the same way elections are won. Who knows how elections are won? Numbers, right? Elections are won on which level? The what's the lowest level? Ward level. What happens? Ward aggregator to what level? Local government. Local government to state to and then national. If you want to win an election, you essentially make sure that you win at each of different ward levels. So we decided that if we're going to spread across the whole of Nigeria, we need to make sure that we win at each ward level. And we created a structure that allowed us to be able to distribute our product from the ward level all the way down to the national level. And this structure is not about people because one common mistake that I can see that leaders make is when you draw structures in your mind, you draw structures because you know that there's one particular smart guy or lady that you want to put in that place. That's not the way structures should be done. Structure should be done in service of the goals that you have. So these seven things I'm listing actually is the way you should think about what you're building. But it's also the way you're going to test when things are going wrong. It's almost like all the time if something is not growing right in your business. You can test it out that what is not going right. Almost all the time it is going to be one or more of these seven things. Did I set the right goals? Do I have the right structure is the next question. The structures must be such that if people want to work, if something needs to get done, you know who is responsible for getting that thing done. Even if you are going to allow two people to be responsible for that thing. Let me give you an example. A simple one will be if salaries are to be paid. That's very straightforward. You need to have a goal of when salaries are to be paid. If you don't have a goal of when salaries are to be paid, if they pay it on the 1st or 3rd is not a problem. So it needs to be clear that salaries are to paid on the 24th. Secondly, who pays the salary? The structure that allows the salary to be paid. Now if you say that HR pays the salary, if HR say I want to pay salary and they don't have the money or the ability to press the, go into the bank account and press the salary payment, you still don't get those goal. Right? So you need to ensure that the structure is such that whoever is responsible for that goal has everything in them to be able to achieve those goals. You create a structure that that structure whoever you have given that goal they don't need to depend on too many people. You reduce the number of dependencies that they have to be able to get their things done. So that structure it needs to be clear who owns what goals. The next one are people. You need to make sure that you have the right people in the right roles. Like I said, this mental model is a model that you can use to build but also to diagnose. If anything is going wrong in your business, you can say, is it goals? Okay, I've set goals. They are clear. Everybody knows what they're supposed to do. We're supposed to make 10 sales this month, 20 sales this month. Is it structure? It is clear who is supposed to go and make those sales because I have four salespeople. Each of those people know their number. Those four sales people work with an operational manager that's supposed to deliver it. The third one is do I have the right people? You know it hits me to the bone when Auntie also mentioned that even Alhaji Dangote was saying that Nigeria we have, if you go to Money Point career websites which you can go and apply if you want to, we have probably maybe 500 vacancies or so and we are struggling to find people to fill those roles. We did not make an attempt to start hiring from Nigeria. As a matter of fact, in 2024, we made a decision that we will no longer hire from any other place than Nigeria. And we chopped the cane in 2025. We chopped the cane in 2025. Not only could we not find people at the quality and the quantity we needed them, the few people that we found were not up to the global standards of quality that we needed. And we're competing globally. You're not competing with just local players. You people know my biggest competition. And you know where they are from? They are from China. I'm competing globally. I need to make sure that I have world-class people working on the organization. And here I am looking for Nigerians that cannot meet the requirements that we need to meet to be able to compete and build world-class products. I blame quite a bit of things. I blame our education system. I used to feel like Nigerians are really really bright and I am honestly beginning to feel like we need to do something to prevent the general IQ of this country from going lower. I am really really worried. I used to feel like intelligence is equally distributed around the world but I am realizing now that environment shapes a lot of things. I am realizing that the social media that we are consuming all the time. I am realizing now that the values that are shaping our systems now, the hookup culture, the yahoo yahoo culture, the let me just do cool things because that's what matters culture. The level that people are reasoning in this country is not as high as it used to be. And this is coming from me that I am a die-hard Nigerian that want Nigerians to grow. We need to do something about it. And my suggestion is we need to create people like John, Auntie, what Pastor Po is doing because I feel like this is a role model problem. This is the problem that the person that they see around them is that local boy that has collected $30,000 and they want to be like him. In the grand scheme of what you can create in a 200 million population, there are many other alternatives to becoming a big boy yo boy. There are many alternatives to becoming a hookup babe that is showing how she is traveling to Dubai and everybody wants to be like her. And that's why I'm hoping that you all subscribe to Auntie's city and see stories of entrepreneurs and become actually be motivated. And every one of you here should also create great things. We create an environment. Nigeria has what it takes. We are driven people. We are motivated people. We are hardworking people. I was in the airport last week. I was in Nigeria last week and British Airways delayed their flight. So, we were supposed to take off around 10:30 and I was still in the airport around I think 1:00 a.m. or 2:00 a.m. And I picked the phone and I texted my main driver. He didn't respond because he was asleep. I called our second driver and driver said I am coming sir now 2:00 a.m. If you guys do, this is not normal behavior in the rest of the world. Just so you know, because I live in the UK. In the UK, UK has labor laws. And in those labor laws world, they will not respond to you even if you're paying their salary. And it's not just the UK, most of the side of the world, we have this level of greed natural inside all of us that if we just need to harness it in the right direction, what we will create in this country. When you want to compare Nigeria and the rest of the world, think of Nigeria as having an American mindset. It's a hard driving, greedy, I want to succeed in life mindset compared to the rest of Africa. I sometimes see if I want to compare, I would say maybe Kenya, Kenyans are like Europeans. Americans, sorry, Nigerians are like the Americans. So we have it in us. All we just need to do is develop our human capital, change this mentality that we have about within our current youths that don't see any other path because of maybe the failure of our government and the lack of faith that they have in them and they are thinking in a different direction and lastly also the fact that there's a mass immigration of talent from the country is also leading to this. So back to my people question now for people generally. Wow I have just 8 minutes left. There are about eight traits that you need to check out on people. The first one is customer obsession. You can't I mean you when you want to describe people what kind of person are you looking for? Let's describe them in like eight traits. The first one is you need to ensure that people are customer obsessed. The number one thing in business is for your customers to love you. That's number one thing. It's not even just your revenue. The number one thing you need to make sure that happens is your customers love you. And why will your customers love you? They will love you when you, there are three levels of why customers will love you. There's something called delighter, performative, and basic. If you give customers their basic requirements, they will say you are okay. If you give something what they, something you do more of something that I expected, let me give you an example of something that is basic. So in Nigeria about five six years ago when all of you were using most of the Nigerian banks where you want to go and buy something and it will fail and when it fails what will happen you will wash plates. Nigeria had a very very low expectation of what a good financial application should look like. What did Money Point come and do? We only just did the reliability. That's all only. It's basic. We only just try to work on making sure that you have the confidence as a business owner to receive payments and it worked during cashless. But you see that only reliability that I mentioned building a reliable infrastructure in an unreliable country is something else. So that's when your service will go down because somebody is doing excavation that has cut one's cable and nobody cares about that. They just say your network is not working. That is when one bank that is supposed to settle you is having core banking application problem and they will not give you the money. That is when one employee that was supposed to deploy something overnight said his internet is not working. Building reliable systems in an unreliable country is something else entirely. But what's the main point? It's basic. It's basic that what we are having an expectation of is that payments should just be reliable. The next thing is performance. It means that customers expect their money to come in quickly. The faster I settle you, the better it is. If somebody will give you their money after, normally banks will typically give money back to their merchants. Who is a merchant here? Who uses POS? Okay. Normally banks will give merchants their money back after the next day many many many years back. What we did is some people were doing every hour. What we just did is instant. The faster you give money to the customers the happier they are. And the last one are delighters. Delighters are things that customers are not expecting. You just do it. They were not expecting it. I don't want to use the word promo because promo is not good for business. But an example is you about to do transaction to a bank and we warn you that this bank is down. Don't send that money now because if you send the money now the money might hang. People will like that, that wow this is good I wasn't expecting it. Now the thing about customers is that we are never sat, customers are never satisfied. You see that delighter will now become basic in the next couple of months. Is now the expectation of everybody and that is why service providers or businesses you cannot stop. You will continually be improving it and improving it and improving it such that your customers will consistently be seeing you as somebody that is delighting them. So you need to make sure that you have people that are customer obsessed because that's the number one thing. When customers love you, the money will follow. If customers cannot differentiate you in the midst of everybody, you are doing a business that is undifferentiated. You have another challenge there also because there's no way customers will love you when all of you are the same. So that's the first trait. The second trait I will need to rush. Wow. Okay. The second trait is craft. You hire somebody to do something, they must be good at it. They must be good at it. The next trait is ability to systemize. In bigger organizations, you cannot create processes in which people will just rely on memory. Human memory is very frail. Who agrees with me here that if you create a process and you say that people this is how we do things if you come back in two weeks time they don't follow it again. Systems needs to be created, those systems in the day of it are automated systems. The next one is ownership. You need to ensure that you have people that have ownership, they are not people that are just coming to come and collect for nothing. Next one is you need to make sure that people move urgently. There are people that are urgent, these traits that you need to expect of people. The next one are no ego, candor and integrity. You want to ensure that people are, you know Nigeria is a very bossy culture and I think this is also another one of our biggest problems. Nigeria has a culture where we are very hierarchical and in the hierarchical we have an expectation that people should be subservient to their bosses. The problem in business is that it prevents flow of information and it creates politics. How many of you works in an organization where there's politics? Ah, too many people are not raising their hand. Politics is caused by the fact that your boss is not a meritocratic boss. Politics is caused by the fact that there are other personal reasons why people are loved. Maybe because the boss is related to this person or the boss are friends or they are from the same town. That's the way politics is caused. If you want to create an organization that can actually scale, politics should not be inside of it. You need to create one that is meritocratic. So I will quickly rush through the people point. Now let me talk about motivating people since we are still on the people point. Who can list all the points I've made so far? What's the first one? Goals. No, no, no, no, no. The primitives themselves. Goals. What? People. And under people, what are the judgment traits you need to have of them? Crafts. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Now all these are the traits that you expect of them. But what do they expect of you? There are four M that I think about for motivation of people generally. If you want to make sure that people are motivated to work for you, the first thing is that they need to have meaning. Why are we doing this thing? The reason why meaning is important is because in life people have something they call different names. One of it is destiny. One of it is vision. The plan I have for my life. Everybody has a mental model of how they want their life to go. They need to know where this company is going and how it fits into them. If somebody cannot see themselves working for you and how it fits into their plan for their lives, they are just going to be passing through you. They're just using you temporarily. So ensuring that your job can give people meaning and most times meaning are related to things in which people can make impact in other people's lives. One of the reasons why people love working for Money Point today is because it's meaningful. The work you are doing every day you can see it how is helping businesses make money. How is growing businesses? You need to create one for yourself. Obviously, if you're working for Covenant Christian Center, you see the meaning of your job every day. If you are working for Mr. John's company, you see the impact that is having on people's lives every day. You need to create this meaning in the minds of people and that's why they will love working for you. The next new reason is mastery. Every nobody wants to stay on one point. Everybody wants to get better. So you need to ensure that you create an environment where people are challenged. Who has noticed that if they are challenged in a particular job even if the money is not very high they know how to, you know you love that job. The next slide is membership. People want to work for an organization that they recognize them internally and they are recognized outside. Everybody wants to be part of a tribe. I work for GT Bank. I work for Money Point. The next slide is I know everybody has been waiting for this, money. So if you provide these four M, funny enough money is not the highest. Funny enough when you hit a certain level of money that people's basic needs are met, money is no longer the highest. People will work for you when they are challenged and the job is meaningful and somebody else will offer them a higher salary and they will not take it. My time is up so I need to move. The next thing is you need to make sure that these people are incentivized. You need to make sure that you've set the goals. There's a structure. You've bought the right people. Give them the right incentives. And incentives are essentially things like you know their performance-based commissions, rewards, public recognitions, things that even if you're not around people are thinking about you to ensure that they continue working. Context. So a lot of times when things are not working well sometimes bosses will feel like this person is bad. Sometimes the person is not bad. Sometimes it's your own problem. Sometimes you have not given people information that they need to be able to make the right decisions and do the right job. How many of you have actually sometimes not done the right thing because they did not tell you the way you're supposed to work and they are now blaming you for it. If bosses are fond of it, we bosses are fond of it because we have the authority and the power but sometimes is not the employees fault. So you also need to have the humility to know that I need to provide context for people. Systems. You need to ensure that it is not because humans memory is not trustworthy. You need to ensure that people have systems in which even if they about to make mistakes, it aligns them and it encodes good judgment in an organization. Governance. This is the last slide for what you need, the seven things that you need to do to build a great company. One is set the right goals. Two, internally, this is internal. I'm not talking about the idea itself. I'm not talking about product market fit, competition. I'm not talking about those ones. I'm saying your own mental model of how we create a great organization inside myself. First one is what? Goals. Second structure. Third people. Fourth system, context. Next, systems. And the last one is governance. Governance is essentially how you correct drift between the reality and the actual. This is how you make sure that are we doing the right things is what you call MPRs, QBRs, performance reviews. This is how you make sure that things are going the right way. And when things are not going the right way, what do you do? You diagnose again with one of these seven principles. If things are not going right, it's either the goals are wrong, people have a problem, structure has a problem or whichever one. All right. So now an important point about this is that this judgment as you want to use it, you can use it to judge yourself, but it's also what your boss can use to judge you and it's also what you can use to judge people under you. So it's not just something that you use to judge your organization. It is something that your boss should also be using to judge you. All right. So like I said is diagnostic. Anybody that is a manager here, I advise you to use it in your mind. If anything is not going, if it's going wrong, what is wrong? All right. Thank you very much everybody. I'm hoping these seven points we can all use to as a mental model for us to run our organization. If you use it, I promise you, you should be on your path to creating another unicorn. Thank you very much.
