Sparkle Business

We officially launched Sparkle this time last year [yes, at the height of the COVID pandemic] with a view to building a digital community centered around trust, transparency, freedom and simplicity. No offline transactions. No murky or opaque decision making. Just data-driven, unbiased choices, in an app that gives its users freedom to do what they want to do so they can move on with their day.

And you know what? It worked. We were able to build a digital financial community, not in spite of, but perhaps somewhat due to, COVID. The plague of our times actually helped to evidence what we had been saying for some time — digital first, cash is unclean. Individuals, small businesses, corporates — everyone was forced to go online and almost instantly saw the benefits of doing so. We were fortunate that we had a platform in place to actually make this happen.

Our Sparkle tribe has worked with us over the past 12 months — they told us what worked, what could work better. We reviewed the data and looked at how the products and services were working for them. We kept a simple, and transparent line of communication with them, constantly re-checking and reworking our offerings to make the most simple and safe financial platform for digital natives. The community worked with us, and it was great to wrap the feedback on individual needs of so many, into tangible product updates.

But Sparkle was never just about the individual — it was about a community, involving individuals and, importantly, businesses. SMEs make up the backbone of business in Nigeria, but they have never really been supported or served in any meaningful way. Traditional banks continue to prefer large scale enterprises and wealthy individuals, whilst professional services are priced for them too. Our SMEs, who are the country’s biggest employer, are mostly left to their own devices. This is why Sparkle Business was always part of our roadmap — because we wanted to fill the many, many gaps in SMEs’ professional support spaces, via a simple, safe digital platform.

It was always our plan to build in Inventory and Invoice Management, a Payment Gateway Service, Tax Advisory/Calculations and Payroll/Employee Management as essential tools to help businesses. I’ve long considered these to be the bare minimum building blocks when building any business. But what has been…