The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) website remains offline since I noted many hours ago that it was down. It is over 48 hours here and the site remains offline despite the public notice where CBN claimed its website was never hacked. In short, it has even lost SSL. I think it is time to put this alert: CBN, your Cloudfare configuration was not done well. Your permission rules are wrong and you are blocking many legitimate traffics. You need to go back into Cloudfare setup and change the permission rules. Anonymous, a hacker group, claimed it touched the site as part of the #ENDSARS protest solidarity.

Recorded 4pm, Oct 18 (Sunday WAT – CBN Website Still Offline Here

The Anonymous group, an online network known for launching cyber attacks against government institutions, has claimed responsibility for bringing down the website of the Central Bank of Nigeria. As I type, CBN website – https://www.cbn.gov.ng/ – is offline. I am told that market data is also not accessible. Largely, the central bank of Nigeria is cut-out of the global internet.

The move was taken in solidarity with the #EndSARS protesters.

Update: As at 1.3pm Lagos time on Sunday, this site is not working for most users in the United States. The issue is that most outside Nigeria are blocked. CBN engineers took that decision on collateral damage since the hackers are outside Nigeria. So, if you block them, the site works in Nigeria. The issue is CBN finding a way to allow legal IPs to pass from outside Nigeria.

What the engineers did was smart but after 48 hours it is no more effective as they are still blocking legal traffic which is coming from outside Nigeria. You cannot because you want to block foreign hackers, you block legal users visiting CBN website from outside Nigeria.

To win in the online space where supply is unbounded and unconstrained, the most important factors are product Differentiation and product Quality. In anything you are doing, you must provide an element of quality. That quality is a binary – it is either good or bad for you, bounded by cost. Differentiation brings what is unique about your offering. It is important to understand that in the online space, category-kings emerge through network effects. Simply, to find value, you must find your space!

Pick a great mission, be great on it and separate from everyone, glory will come. As I explained in this Harvard Business Review article, it is through this high quality and evidently differentiated product that you can thrive in the digital world dominated by Google, Facebook and other ICT utilities.

Just think about it, if you are looking for something online, you will see many options once you search on Google. Because of that abundance, you want to narrow to the specific one which meets your niche needs. Any product which can do that at high quality makes the cut. This becomes exceedingly necessary when you plan to put a paywall in that online venture. It is very possible that anything you are offering has a free version somewhere. The implication is that your capacity to meet specific niche needs, at high quality, is what people are paying for. It is hopeless pursuing a paid product vision online without a strategy of creating a differentiated product at high quality.

Win the prize – go niche at high quality, and stay the course!

NIBSS ( Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc) has good data which helps us to make sense of digital payment growth (not just online). In Nigeria, we have 3 main card types: Verve, Visa and Mastercard. Most times, you need the card to do ATM, online payment, etc. So, most of the payment channels are connected to cards with one of the three logos.

This plot gives you the average in the world (excluding China). Yes, Visa and Mastercard are both growing at an average of 11% yearly. Alipay which is much younger than Visa and Mastercard does far better; Visa was founded in 1958, Mastercard in 1966, and Alipay in 2004. Alipay which mainly serves China processed $18 trillion worth of transactions in 2019; Visa and Mastercard combined for $16 trillion.

For Nigeria, including Verve, it is very safe to write that digital payment is growing at least 4x the Visa and Mastercard global average, bringing it to at least 40%. This is possible as Nigeria is still at the infancy phase of our payment digitization process.

This represents a 59 per cent increase in the volume of transactions on the three platforms, compared with 117.84 million recorded in 2019.

Further analysis showed that the value of the PoS transactions grew by 70 per cent from N217.46bn in March 2019 to N368.86bn in March this year.

The volume of the PoS deals also increased by 75 per cent to 52.25 million in March compared with 29.82 million transactions recorded in the corresponding period in 2019.

The banking industry data indicated that NIP deals had a 28 per cent improvement in terms of the value of transaction when compared to the same period in 2019, when NIP deals amounted to N8.58tn.

The volume of NIP deals also increased by 54 per cent to 135.3 million in March 2020, compared with 87.94 million transactions recorded in the corresponding month in 2019.

If you look at the Alipay leapfrogging, Nigeria and Africa could be a better frog. You must digitize your operations because no matter what is happening today, tomorrow belongs to digital!

I received many questions from our community after the announcement of the $200 million acquisition of Paystack by Stripe. Many wanted to know if they should fold their physical businesses and focus online. Like I noted, what happened in Paystack is not typical, on how 60,000 customers (most there are extremely small web companies) could translate to a $200 million value. Yet, it is key to note that in all Paystack and Stripe official press releases, they did not mention  any “$200 million”.

The amount was a creation of a tech blog and it could indeed be that Paystack was not acquired near that amount. I am bringing that up to help people to calibrate [you are doing well; keep pushing]. Yes, it is very possible that Paystack was bought for $80 million or $250 million. The fact is this; no outsider knows the amount! (If you have seen any official tag of that amount, share with me.)

That said, digital is a promise but offline remains the huge opportunity of today across most sectors in Nigeria. You need to have a plan for offline even as you plan to win in the digital world of tomorrow. Our governments are still offline. Most of our richer citizens have nothing to do with putting their debit cards online. In short, by Nigerian law, an online job advertisement is not enough to meet the legal standards in government recruitment. That explains why Jobberman, a digital recruiter, has to advertise jobs in the print newspapers!

Refer to this old video I made: continue to deepen capabilities in the opportunity of today even as you shift into the one of tomorrow. That strategy will save you resources in a market of 200 million with only 30 million having capacity to spend.

The Precious 30 Million Nigerians