Adedapo Adesanya
By Adedapo Adesanya
To herald its 20th-anniversary commemoration, Interswitch has launched a new brand campaign to project its positioning as a pioneering and integral enabler in the Nigerian business ecosystem.
The campaign tagged #NeverStop will not only actively support the growth and development of fintech and payments across Africa over the last 20 years but also amplify the brand’s progressive outlook as a frontier-driving company that keeps pushing boundaries and facilitating the creation of new ecosystems that help businesses and individuals scale and thrive.
Speaking at the anniversary kick-off on Tuesday, the founder/Group CEO of the company, Mr Mitchell Elegbe, said this is in line with its purpose of inspiring Africa to greatness through innovation, value-creation, and excellence.
“Today, as we flag off our celebrations, there is quite a lot of excitement within Interswitch, but also some deep reflection as we look back on the journey of the last two decades – twenty years of transforming Africa’s digital economy. Interswitch was founded to solve a social problem – to make people’s lives easier when it came to payments, transactions, and access their funds.
“We saw a way to do this by developing products and services with the consumer at the heart, leading with technology and innovation. As is the case with many pioneers, while we navigated uncharted waters, there were times when we pushed ahead with absolutely no assurances and were buoyed up by just sheer tenacity and grit.
“At those times, the big picture kept us going, our dream to deliver a prosperous Africa, driven by a seamless exchange of value and commerce,” he stated.
Mr Elegbe noted that the foregoing was the foundation upon which Interswitch’s two flagship products, Quickteller and Verve, were created – born from the over-arching mission to solve problems and focused on delivering comprehensive solutions for individuals to make everyday payments, to help connect and simplify the lives of our consumers across the continent.
From Mr Elegbe’s perspective, the runway for growth remains significant as well over 50 per cent of Nigeria is still unbanked or underbanked and 85 per cent of transactions in sub-Saharan Africa still occur in cash.
“Today, technology is at the forefront of society and will continue to play a significant role in how we work and live. Nigeria is fast becoming the tech-capital of Africa, with one of the fastest growing tech markets in the world.”
“Interswitch has always been focused on the bigger picture, with the understanding that “going it alone” is not the answer, and that we do better by working together.
Building a profitable, thriving business has been important, but in order to achieve our purpose of Inspiring Africa to Greatness, we had to play our part in providing an enabling environment for the holistic ecosystem to thrive,” he said.
On her part, Ms Cherry Eromosele, the company’s Executive Vice-President for Group Marketing and Communications stated that “As we look ahead, we see enormous potential for future growth and the furthering of our vision. The outlook is rapidly evolving; At Interswitch, we also see the application of digital payments as being sector-agnostic and, with the increasing adoption of technology and digital payments across Nigeria and Africa, opportunities to broaden the fintech/payments landscape continue to present themselves”.
Over the next six months, the company intends to progressively unveil a line-up of brand campaigns, commemorative events, and thought-leadership initiatives centred around this significant corporate milestone on a Pan-African level.
Founded in 2002, Interswitch disrupted the traditional cash-based payments value chain in Nigeria by supporting the introduction of electronic payments processing and switching services.
