First, let me get it out: you are statistically better in our modern world to have a great career (financially) if you studied electronics/computer engineering than Igbo language. Yes, technical degrees typically outperform non-technical degrees on career resilience and  financial rewards, on average. 

Yet, that construct has blindfolded many of us to think that Computer Science, Electronics and similar domains are absolute on career security.  In this age, there is nothing like that. One AI could replace a whole company and its amalgam of computer scientists. In other words, no one is safe!

Where am I going? Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has started laying off another batch of global citizens and this batch has many technical staff: “ Employees in fields like software engineering, graphics programming and gameplay development were among those affected Wednesday, according to LinkedIn posts. … anonymous sources told CNBC. In total, Meta plans to let go of 21,000 employees between two rounds of layoffs”.

Good People, everything has changed. The only job security now is Knowledge and that knowledge has to be dynamic. And it has to be a moving average, otherwise, many will experience the Stage, the political ad which Obama world ran against Mitt Romney, telling the world that Romney bought a company, and asked the workers to build a nice stage, only for him to arrive, mount the stage and told them that they were fired! Most people today improving AI models are building a stage. To survive your career, a new knowledge system has become important because machines may do most of the techy stuff.

As I sat down, I saw a political ad: a factory man explained how Mitt Romney (competing against Obama for US presidency) had asked them to build a stage, and how Romney later came, and fired all of them while standing on that stage. That was my first time of watching the “Stage”, the ad that destroyed Romney’s any chance of winning the presidency. How do you ask people to build a stage so that you can be visible as you fire them? The message was politically lethal. (The advert below)

That takes me to the news that Goldman Sachs software developers are now using ChatGPT to get their codes going: “Reports reveal that software developers at leading global investment banking, securities, and investment management firm, Goldman Sachs, are internally using generative AI tools to assist in writing and testing codes.”

Tesla is running a pricing experiment, and we can learn something from it, and apply some components of the experiment in our businesses. Yes, when customers are stressed, you open the pricing engineering textbook to help them, and stay relevant. And how do you do that? You chop your margin because that could be the only strategy especially when there is a brutal competitor named BYD which is on the crosshairs.

BYD, a Chinese EV maker, is throwing frontal and frank attacks on Tesla, and hitting the target really well. “Tesla last year reduced its prices in China twice. BYD increased its prices. We are direct competitors. BYD is so much ahead of Tesla in China “, says Berkshire Hathaway chairman Charlie Munger, a business partner of Warren Buffett. In other words, BYD has lifted the veil of Tesla before Chinese customers, and pricing movement did not move the demand on the curve for Tesla at scale.

Good people, in 2023, Tesla has cut its prices at least 6 times. The Model 3 now will not take you off by up to $40,000, while you get a change of $3,000 on Model Y. Despite what the company will tell you, it is not doing all these cuts at the position of strength. Chinese EV makers are hurting Tesla’s position globally.

Indeed, if you look deeper, Chinese EV vehicles appear destined to win the EV future because they are extremely great competitors in this space. Of course, governments will make that impossible through subsidies and artificial levers of tax credits in Europe and North America. But anywhere else, that is an open debate.

Yet, what Tesla is doing is working because that is how to survive to compete tomorrow: ‘Tesla’s price cuts are boosting demand, but they’re also taking a toll on profit. The EV maker’s first-quarter earnings were on par with analysts’ expectations, but net income was down 24% year over year as the firm absorbed the impact of plummeting prices, The Wall Street Journal reports. Deliveries were up 36% over the same period. Tesla said it was confident its operating margin “will remain among the highest in the industry” despite that number falling close to 8% in the past year.’

The lesson, obeying Econ 101: deliveries were up 36% but income was down 24% year over year. Score: goalless, keeping investors out of their panic pills until the next quarter. Only dynamic managers will win the future. Tesla has shown agility on this matter.

BYD Continues To Gain on Tesla Globally After Beating It In China

BoundlessPay, a Nigeria-focused payment platform, is working on an offline payment system that will benefit the unbanked population.

According to CEO Franklin Peters, the company plans to expand its user-base by offering payment channels that use SMS and email verification. This will speak to those who do not have access to smartphones or constant Internet. The new version of the application is expected to go live by Q2, 2023.

BoundlessPay offers its users a platform to buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrencies through its mobile phone applications both on Android and iOS. It also enables users to send cryptocurrencies to other users through its peer-to-peer (P2P) service, making remittance easy and cost effective.

Boundless Pay Ecosystem

“In our future rollout, if you don’t have a smartphone, a person can pay money to your phone number or email and get a code for withdrawal,” Peters told in an interview with NODO News. Recipients can then cash out through the bank of their choice or BoundlessPay agents. The company plans to increase its agent base from the current 20 to 1,000 as it rolls out its next phase.

“So, it (payment) doesn’t need to go through the National Payment System (NPS),” he says. NPS is the technology that Nigerian banks use to wrap their payments. “This allows us to offer a wide variety of options to our users, while still ensuring that there’s never a downtime in payment processing and settlement.”

BoundlessPay’s innovation around offline payments bridges the financial inclusion gap in the Sub-Saharan Africa, where 55% of people still didn’t have access to a bank account in 2021, according to the World Bank.

“On average, only 5% to 7% of all payment transactions in Africa were made via electronic or digital channels, compared to 50% or more in Turkey, for instance,” a McKinsey report on Future of Payments in Africa.

The growth towards digital payments is likely to be uneven across the continent, the report says. Overall it will depend on infrastructure readiness, e-commerce penetration, mobile-money penetration, and regulation, among other factors, in each market.

How Remittance Pain Gave Way to BoundlessPay

“It’s been a long-standing mission to solve a problem around payment, settlement, and remittances,” Peters says. His experience with the old, time-consuming and expensive remittance services egged him on to look for other ways to send and receive money.

“I came across Bitcoin in 2015, by helping someone remit a million dollars using Bitcoin. I spent just about $1 in fees for that transaction. It was an eye-opener,” he narrates. BoundlessPay was created under Boundless Nexus in 2019 but went live in 2021.

The CEO confirmed that BoundlessPay is serving more than 14,000 users, mostly in Nigeria.

The firm is also targeting commerce transactions for business cases by introducing tools to settle payments in the upcoming version.

It is currently working on a new version of its app to include invoicing, payment links, and bulk payments, according to Peters. The application will be a unified platform for payment tools as opposed to the siloed manner most payment apps do.