Pan-African ICT company, CWG Plc has rejigged its bills presentment, aggregation and payment platform, BillsnPay as part of an effort to address some of the teething challenges of Small, Medium Enterprises in Nigeria.
According to CWG, the challenges this solution will address among the SMEs are the lack of data for business insight, late and nonpayment of bills by their customers and high cost of operation and maintenance.
Others include late delivery of bills to their customers and delay in the reconciliation of payments made against the Bill. These challenges, CWG argues have impacted negatively on the revenues of SMEs, which hold a very important piece of Nigeria’s economic puzzle.
“The challenges we have identified will negatively impact the cash flow of these businesses, thereby causing hardship and bankruptcy of such initiatives. Thus, we have designed the BillsnPay platform for SMEs to do business effectively and improve the business process to deliver higher revenues,” said Tereigh Ozakpo, CWG’s Head, Digital Financial Platforms.
A report by the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in 2013 had posited that Nigeria has over forty million small-medium enterprises (SMEs) contributing about 50 percent of Nigeria’s GDP. They reported that these SMEs employ 80 percent of Nigeria’s workforce, but regrettably, about 70 percent of these SMEs fold up within three years of operations and only about one million, five hundred thousand (1.5 million) of them are registered for tax.
This CWG believes BillsnPay will address as it supports SMEs business by providing e-invoices and provides value-added services to customers by aggregating other billers such airtime, data, cable TV, electricity and other billers in one platform for ease and convenience.
According to Tereigh, BillsnPay allows payment to different merchants’ services in Naira and other currencies and provides strategic intelligence to biller and customer at a glance through its intuitive dashboard.
He added that one of the unique feature and benefit of BillsnPay is that registration on the platform is seamless as it is done anytime, any day and anywhere through web or app which can be downloaded from Google Play and Appstore.
The BillsnPay solution is adapted to serve all channels ranging from Web, Mobile, USSD, Internet Banking, POS and ATM technologies. The processes are simple to use and very efficient to deliver the identified value proposition.