Good People, join me as we welcome Ahmadu Bello University (ABU Zaria) students to Tekedia CollegeBoost, a Tekedia Mini-MBA designed for students. Your university has prepared you all, Tekedia will simply expand your horizons on market systems. As we begin the academic excursion on Monday, we are very confident that new vistas will emerge and young people will advance the wealth in nations. Welcome!

Tekedia CollegeBoost is an Advanced Diploma in Business Administration designed for students in colleges. It involves an 8-week program which could be broken into two semesters or taken in one semester, depending on the arrangement with the school or group of students. This course is only offered to a group of students.

Schools, to join Tekedia CollegeBoost, connect here via email .

Thank you Jollof Republik, Texas, USA for sponsoring 10 students to Tekedia Mini-MBA which begins June 7 to end Sept 1, 2021. At Tekedia Institute, we thank you for investing in the future of the youth; you are a Funder of the Future.

Jollof Republik  is uniting people of a colorful heritage. It guarantees an authentic cultural experience, an opportunity to create impactful relationships, and a community that builds bridges and harnesses our collective strengths.

This scholarship is for current students in any university in Africa. Youth Up will do the selection and send the ten names to the Institute. (If your non-profit has structures to find in-need people or students for academic scholarships, email my team to be included in our recruitment system.)

Jollof Republik, we wish you open markets and opportunities as you continue to serve your customers, and bless humanity. Thank you for your partnership.

Good People, join me to  welcome Saima Khan, a partner in Toronto-based Strategic Pricing Management Group (SPMG), to Tekedia Institute as a Finance Faculty, focusing on pricing, revenue growth and profitability.

SPMG is a global leader in the development of value-based strategies. The firm provides value-based solutions to its clients with unique guidance and insights for their pricing and marketing strategies and tactics.

Saima builds profit models and helps global firms strategically optimize profitability while accelerating revenue. She holds a Master’s Degree in Finance from Harvard University.

This course has been added in Tekedia Mini-MBA next edition which begins June 7. We expect it to help business leaders, entrepreneurs and founders acquire capabilities on how to maximally price their products and services without any adverse effect on growth.

Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA here.

We have two more days to conclude Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 4. At 7pm WAT today,  Tekedia Live will focus on “The Call to Business Execution”. Largely, it is ACTION time and we need to go to the markets, and apply the constructs, capabilities and frameworks we have mastered. Until it is done, it has not been done.

How do we get things done? How do we execute in markets? I hope to meet in class in about two hours.

Thur, May 6 | 7pm – 8.30pm WAT  | The Call to Business Execution – Ndubuisi Ekekwe . Zoom link in the Board.

Registration for the next edition of Tekedia Mini-MBA (June 7 – Sept 1, 2021) continues here . It is $140 (or N50k) for the 12-week program which is self-paced and wholly online. Join us.

Paystack, a Nigerian fintech startup, which recently was acquired by Stripe, is planning to expand its services to South Africa, an indication of further growth since its acquisition seven months ago.

The startup has come from a little beginning to become a notable payment platform in the global stage. In 2018 when Paystack raised $8 million in Series A funding, led by Stripe and others, it was only powering 15% of all online payments in Nigeria. With a customer-base of more than 10,000 businesses on its platform, Paystack’s next line of action was to expand to African countries. It started with Ghana.

Ever since then, the company has seen significant growth, increasing its customer-base in Nigeria to 60,000, powering around 50% of all online payments. The customers which include MTN, SPAR and UPS, use the company’s software to collect payments globally.

Techcrunch reported that the South African launch was preceded by a six-month pilot, which means the project kickstarted a month after Stripe acquired it. And also, Stripe is gearing toward a hotly anticipated IPO, which is fueling its aggressive expansion to other markets.

It is also seen as a reason why the company acquired Paystack as it was seeking a foothold in Africa. Before acquiring Paystack, the company added 17 countries to its platform in 18 months, but none from Africa.

In March, Stripe raised $600 million in additional rounds to expand its services in Europe, putting its valuation at $95 billion.

“The company will use the capital to invest in its European operations, and its Dublin headquarters in particular, support surging demand from enterprise heavyweights across Europe, and expand its Global Payments and Treasury Network,” Stripe said in a statement.

While Europe offers a huge market for Stripe, the fintech boom in Africa presents growth opportunities that the company cannot ignore.

“There is an enormous opportunity. In absolute numbers, Africa may be smaller right now than other regions, but online commerce will grow about 30% every year. And even with wider global declines, online shoppers are growing twice as fast. Stripe thinks on a longer time horizon than others because we are an infrastructure company. We are thinking of what the world will look like in 2040-2050,” CEO Patrick Collison said.

Nigeria, Ghana and now South Africa make up the 42 countries where Stripe is operational, and the company hopes to ride on the back of Paystack to penetrate more markets in Africa.

“South Africa is one of the continent’s most important markets, and our launch here is a significant milestone in our mission to accelerate commerce across Africa,” said Paystack CEO Shola Akinlade of the expansion. “We’re excited to continue building the financial infrastructure that empowers ambitious businesses in Africa, helps them scale and connects them to global markets.”

However, the new market presents Paystack with a new challenge different from what it had to deal with in West Africa, where it worked with different businesses and grow a local team to handle on-the-ground operations during the six-month pilot.

In South Africa, fintech companies like Yoco and DPO, who are already dominating the market, are ready to give Paystack a run for their money. The move into South Africa thus sets the Nigerian startup up for a fierce competition. But the company’s product marketer said the new market is wide enough to accommodate everyone.

“The opportunity for innovation in the South African payment space is far from saturated. Today, for instance, digital payments make up less than half of all transactions in the country,” Abdulrahman Jogbojogbo, product marketer at Paystack said. “So, the presence of competition is not only welcome; it’s encouraged. The more innovative plays there are, the faster it’ll be to realize our goal of having an integrated African market.”

Khadijah Abu, head of product expansion, added that “for many businesses in South Africa, we know that accepting payments online can be cumbersome. Our pilot in South Africa was hyper-focused on removing barriers to entry, eliminating tedious paperwork, providing world-class API documentation to developers, and making it a lot simpler for businesses to accept payments online.”