Blockchain technology is also revolutionizing supply chains in the pharmaceutical industry, in the process, helping track fake medicines. 



From genomics to robotics, technology is truly revolutionizing
the healthcare sector. And while it’s easy to become consumed by exciting,
futuristic trends like artificial intelligence (AI) diagnosis, digitized
patient records and 3D-printed medical tools, technology is also transforming
the pharmaceutical industry. How medication is prescribed, dispensed and
administered is big business with McKinsey predicting the value of Africa’s
pharmaceutical industry to be $65 billion in 2020.



But fake drugs are an ongoing and complex issue – they can
cause death, have unknown side-effects, fail to treat illnesses, and sometimes
even add to the spread of disease. According to World Health Organization (WHO)
statistics, 42% of detected cases of falsified (or substandard) pharmaceuticals
occur in Africa – reports estimate that between 72,000 and 169,000 children die
each year from pneumonia because of counterfeit antibiotics while fake malaria
drugs cause an additional 64,000 –158,000 deaths every year in sub-Saharan
Africa. Both antimalarials and antibiotics sit among the most commonly-reported
counterfeited drugs.



“Fake medicine distribution is rampant because business
processes are siloed between the various industry stakeholders, which puts the
industry at risk of fraud,” explains Heidi Patmore, a marketing consultant
specializing in technology that’s changing consumer behavior. 



“One solution to this would be cross-company process
automation which could easily be enabled by a blockchain data interchange. This
creates an open information system that all players can use to verify the
authenticity of medication because it can track and trace it from when it’s
manufactured to when it is dispensed to the patient.”



Companies such as IBM and SAP are working on blockchain
solutions to weed out Africa’s counterfeit medication network. When medicine is
returned to pharmaceutical manufacturers, for example, it is often re-sold
instead of being destroyed. How can a small local pharmacy ensure what is
returned is authentic? SAP are working with their existing client base – Merck,
GSK, Ingelheim, McKesson and others – on a blockchain project to verify that
any returned drugs are original. 



IBM Research’s solution for Africa (currently in development
in Haifa, Israel) includes a mobile interface and permissioned blockchain
backend that enables each certified and authorized party in the network to
initiate action, finish their transaction, and track its progress. 



“It also includes the monitoring of temperature to ensure
compliance with the proper conditions for transportation and asset transfer,”
adds Inna Skarbovsky, a blockchain architect from IBM Research – Haifa.
“Blockchain ensures full provenance for each medicine package, uniquely
identified with a barcode or a serial number. This makes it possible for all
authorized parties to track the drugs through the entire supply chain and the
drugs’ life-cycle.”



This also allows significant cost reductions by eliminating each participant’s need to manage a separate system for traceability of its components. “It also improves procedural efficiency for change-of-hands, make it much harder for counterfeit drugs to be introduced into the supply chain and to be distributed to end-users,” says Skarbovsky.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="768" height="1024" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/IMG_20190927_124217-1-768x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-42537"/><figcaption> Towett Ngetich, CEO of Uthabiti Health, a Kenya-based pharmaceutical company </figcaption></figure>



Towett Ngetich is the CEO of Uthabiti Health, a Kenya-based pharmaceutical company that has implemented blockchain to bring transparency and accountability back to a country where statistics show that 30% of medicines sold are counterfeit. Uthabiti, which means ‘verify’ in Swahili, was started after Ngetich’s first-hand experience with the effects of fake health products: “Back in university, a significant number of students fell victim to unplanned pregnancies and unsafe abortions. With deep research, it was uncovered that there had been a supply of fake contraceptives and backstreet abortion pills into the student market,” explains Ngetich. More findings showed the presence of fake antibiotics, antiretrovirals (ARVs) and non-communicable diseases (NCD) medicines in the Kenyan pharmaceutical supply chain. 



“Pharmaceutical science is the center of healthcare – one
mistake in any drug composition or formulation has the risk of endangering a
significant number of people. The need to access safe, affordable and quality
health products in its simplest form means life and death in diagnosed health complications.
Blockchain gives patients the ability to track and trace products using
attached IDs – it also gives Uthabiti Health the ability to know where all our
health products sit within each supply chain,” he says. Uthabiti Health
procures medicines from different pharmaceutical manufacturers. Once received,
they go to an internal laboratory for quality testing and are then labeled with
the product’s safety lab report – attached in their codes is a unique
blockchain ID. The medicines are then passed on to their partnering retail
points, ensuring that the medicines dispensed to patients can be verified with
something as simple as a text message. 



“This brings in consumers in safe-proofing the supply chain
of pharmaceuticals,” adds Ngetich. 



The proliferation of fake drugs throughout Africa is complex
– on average, medicine changes 30 hands before reaching the destined pharmacy –
but blockchain technology has great potential to help stop counterfeit medicine
distribution because it brings traceability and trackability to the entire
pharmaceutical supply chain, ensuring the immutability of information.&nbsp; 



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">Blockchain ethics?</h4>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="709" height="1024" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CandicedC-709x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-42533" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CandicedC-709x1024.jpg 709w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CandicedC-300x433.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CandicedC-600x867.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CandicedC-208x300.jpg 208w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CandicedC-768x1110.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CandicedC-1063x1536.jpg 1063w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CandicedC.jpg 1329w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 100vw, 709px" /><figcaption>Candice De Carvalho</figcaption></figure>



While blockchain is still a relatively niche technology, it is slowly changing how organizations operate. Blockchain promises better security and transparency, but not necessarily for the customer, in the case of drug allocation: “Where blockchain technology could likely increase efficiency and simultaneously decrease the abuse of medicines, customers benefit. The pharmaceutical and related industries are unique however, in that the ‘consumer’ is also a patient – a vulnerable group with special needs and rights,” explains Candice De Carvalho, the founder of Easy Ethics CPD.



Although overall transparency in the supply chain increases
through the use of blockchain, and this confers patient benefits, these must be
weighed against patient privacy and confidentiality.&nbsp; 



“With emerging technologies more freely available, we’ve
observed an interesting shift in patient behavior, where data privacy is
regarded less as an absolute by patients, in favor of a kind of sliding scale,
where privacy itself is a currency that purchases medical benefits along the
way,” adds De Carvalho. “Patients, for the right benefits, are perhaps more willing
to part with some privacy privileges.”



De Carvalho questions the genuine knowledge that patients
have of any exposure they experience through their use of novel medical device
or systems innovations. The key drivers for the business are not necessarily
unified with the total needs of the patient. However, the more the technology
owners protect and balance the patient’s need for confidentiality and consent,
the more they will ultimately see business benefit.&nbsp; 



“In the context of a doctor-patient relationship, the doctor has a positive duty to enhance patient understanding so that the patient enjoys a truly informed consent. Does this then mean that technology providers are now responsible in the same way that medical health workers are?” she ends.



-Tiana Cline

GettyImages-1056482262

Cure For Counterfeit Drugs?

Carmaker Ford (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=F.N">F.N</a>), technology giant IBM (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=IBM.N">IBM.N</a>), South Korean cathode maker LG Chem (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=051910.KS">051910.KS</a>) and China’s Huayou Cobalt (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=603799.SS">603799.SS</a>) have joined forces in the first blockchain project to monitor cobalt supplies from Democratic Republic of Congo. 



The pilot, overseen by responsible-sourcing group RCS Global, aims to help manufacturers ensure that cobalt used in lithium-ion batteries has not been mined by children or used to fuel conflict.



Companies are under pressure from consumers and investors to prove that minerals are sourced without human rights abuses, but tracking raw materials throughout their journey is challenging.



The project announced on Wednesday has been quietly under way since December. Starting with industrially mined cobalt in Congo, it is monitoring supplies all the way to lithium-ion batteries for Ford vehicles.



Supplies of cobalt, expected to be needed in huge quantities for electric vehicles and electronic devices, are concentrated in Congo, a sprawling, volatile nation that has been racked by civil war and political tension.



The outcome of elections in December, which had been intended to be Congo’s first democratic transfer of power in six decades, is contested. 



RCS says the IBM blockchain platform could be used to include other minerals and to allow artisanal miners, which analysts say are the biggest issue with regard to ethical sourcing, to join a blockchain-based network of validated participants.



Blockchain, famed as the technology behind cryptocurrency bitcoin, works by providing a shared record of data held by a network of individual computers rather than a single party.



For the pilot project, which should be completed around the middle of the year, cobalt from Huayou’s industrial mine will be placed in secure bags, entered into a blockchain and traced from the mine and smelter to LG Chem’s cathode and battery plant in South Korea and then on to a Ford plant in the United States.



Because minerals are often combined with metals from various sources when they are smelted, they are particularly difficult to track.



The RCS project seeks to enforce best practice by using guidelines drawn up by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.



IBM said it was exploring the potential of chemical analysis using artificial intelligence to pinpoint the origin of cobalt and ensure so-called clean cobalt was not smelted with minerals sourced less responsibly.



“There is no fool-proof method, but you have to keep the ball moving forward, to keep raising the level of accuracy,” Manish Chawla, general manager of IBM’s mining and industrial sector business, told Reuters.



VW and Ford team up



“Blockchain has been proven to be a very effective technology in raising the bar.”



IBM has already worked with retailers including Walmart (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=WMT.N">WMT.N</a>) and Carrefour (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=CARR.PA">CARR.PA</a>) to trace food through supply chains. 



In the mining sector, meanwhile, Anglo American’s (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=AAL.L">AAL.L</a>) De Beers has begun using blockchain to track diamonds. -Reuters



&#8211; Barbara Lewis

HP1EF1E1203PY

Ford and IBM among quartet in Congo cobalt blockchain project

In the summer of 2013, as Matthew Zeiler was close to finishing a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence at New York University, he seemed to have every tech giant in the palm of his hand. Zeiler had left an internship with a Google AI group a few weeks earlier when he got a call from an unknown number while he was running along the Hudson River. It was Alan Eustace, then a senior vice president of engineering at Google, who had heard about Zeiler&#8217;s AI chops. Eustace wanted Zeiler to join permanently. To entice him, Eustace told him he would make an offer that was among the highest Google had ever made to a new graduate, Zeiler recalls. Zeiler won&#8217;t say how much he was offered, and Google declined to comment. But offers for top recruits with specific expertise can add up to several millions of dollars over four years, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Regardless, Google&#8217;s offer kicked off a bidding war for Zeiler and his know-how in deep learning, the vaunted branch of AI that&#8217;s driving major breakthroughs in computing.
Within days, Zeiler received a bigger offer from Microsoft, which Google promptly matched. Apple also wanted to chat, and when Zeiler flew out to Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg personally sought to persuade him to join a new AI research group at Facebook. Zeiler respectfully turned them all down, deciding instead to start a company with an audacious goal: to compete with the giants that were courting him. &#8220;It was a crazy period,&#8221; Zeiler remembers. &#8220;I had this low-risk opportunity of joining a tech giant versus doing my own startup.&#8221;
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Zeiler says he knew that some of his algorithms worked better than Google&#8217;s on certain AI problems. &#8220;I knew I had to follow my gut,&#8221; he says.
Four years later, Zeiler&#8217;s New York City-based startup, Clarifai, is widely seen as one of the most promising in the crowded, buzzy field of machine learning. Clarifai offers image- and video-recognition tools for developers that rival those from Google, Microsoft and others. Much as Stripe and Twilio make it easy for programmers to tap into payments and communications capabilities, Clarifai gives its customers access to cutting-edge AI techniques that would cost millions to replicate. Companies like Unilever, BuzzFeed, Ubisoft and Staples U.K., as well as makers of medical devices and drones, use Clarifai to automatically analyze millions of images and videos. One of the company&#8217;s 100 or so customers, i-Nside, makes a smartphone accessory for imaging the inside of an eardrum and diagnosing ear diseases. Revenue, while still small, is expected to reach $10 million as early as next year, according to people close to the company.
That Clarifai has made it this far is, in and of itself, remarkable. In the past few years, AI &#8211; in particular a form of it called deep learning or deep neural networks &#8211; has emerged as the Next Big Thing in tech. Deep-learning techniques work loosely like the brain, with layers of &#8220;neurons&#8221; connected with &#8220;synapses.&#8221; The techniques are leading to substantial breakthroughs in areas like image and speech recognition, which in turn are ushering in advances in everything from medicine to self-driving cars to robotics.
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But there&#8217;s a problem: Amid the scramble for talent, the richest companies in tech have consumed entire university departments and acquired just about every AI startup they could get their hands on. Google has been the hungriest, with at least 11 AI-related acquisitions, spending upwards of $1 billion for just two of those, DeepMind and api.ai. Nearly all the upstarts that competed with Clarifai have been bought: Amazon acquired Orbeus; Salesforce got MetaMind; IBM snapped up AlchemyAPI. When it comes to image recognition, Clarifai is perhaps the only one left that can compete with Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, all of which offer AI image-recognition tools to their cloud-computing customers. Clarifai has already rebuffed several multi-million-dollar acquisition offers, according to an early employee. Zeiler says he is determined to keep the company independent.
Clarifai has none of the might or reach of its rivals, but Zeiler insists, convincingly, that playing Switzerland in a global AI war is a valuable asset. Many large companies that want to incorporate AI into their products are fearful of handing over their data to giants like Google and Amazon. Photobucket is a case in point. After assessing competing tools from Amazon, Google and IBM, the image- and video-hosting service became one of Clarifai&#8217;s largest customers in terms of image volume. &#8220;Any time you&#8217;re dealing with Google, you have to wonder if they&#8217;re taking your data and training their own system,&#8221; says Mike Knowles, senior infrastructure developer at Photobucket. With its Photos app, Google competes with Photobucket. Zeiler says many other potential customers are at risk of colliding with the ever-expanding ambitions of tech&#8217;s biggest companies. &#8220;They open new divisions that compete with their customers,&#8221; Zeiler says. &#8220;That&#8217;s what we don&#8217;t do.&#8221;
At 30, Zeiler, who grew up in Beausejour, a small town in Canada some 40 miles northeast of Winnipeg, seems an unlikely challenger to tech&#8217;s powerhouses. With slicked-back hair that he cuts only a couple of times a year, he retains the disheveled air of a college student.
But Zeiler&#8217;s obsession with AI put him on a path to be mentored by some of the field&#8217;s biggest luminaries. Oddly enough, his interest in the field started with a video of a flickering flame that he saw while an undergraduate at the University of Toronto. The video, shown to him by a grad student, looked startlingly real, yet it was generated by a computer using an AI technique. Zeiler had just learned the basics of computer programming but hadn&#8217;t taken to it. The flame represented something different. No human had explicitly programmed it to move around in predetermined ways. Instead, a computer had been fed video data, deduced a pattern and generated the video on its own. &#8220;I was completely blown away,&#8221; Zeiler says. &#8220;It was a whole new way to get computers to do what you wanted. I had to learn more.&#8221;
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Graham Taylor, the Ph.D. candidate who had shown him the video, brought Zeiler into a research lab that was run by Geoffrey Hinton, widely considered one of the godfathers of neural networks. Taylor liked the ambitious yet amiable Zeiler. &#8220;He was smart but wasn&#8217;t a jerk,&#8221; Taylor says. In Hinton&#8217;s lab Zeiler worked on using AI techniques to track pigeons&#8217; mating rituals, resulting in his first paper, &#8220;Learning Pigeon Behaviour Using Binary Latent Variables.&#8221; He graduated at the top of his class.
Zeiler then headed to NYU for a Ph.D., following Taylor, who was a postdoctoral student there. Taylor worked under Yann LeCun, another pioneer in deep learning, who now heads Facebook&#8217;s AI efforts. Eventually, Zeiler did two internships at Google and worked for Jeff Dean, the head of a then-new deep-learning research group called Google Brain. Hinton, who now works at Google and retains a position at the university, was part of that 20-person AI skunkworks. (Google Brain has since grown into one of the most high-profile and vital groups within Google.)
Zeiler founded Clarifai in November 2013 after his second internship, just as he was finishing his Ph.D. The company got off to an auspicious start. Zeiler tested his image-recognition algorithms in a highly regarded contest called ImageNet. The 2012 ImageNet had shaken the AI world when a team from Hinton&#8217;s lab in Toronto, using deep-learning techniques, cracked a huge barrier in accuracy: Its error rate was 15%, far better than the 25% attained with earlier AI approaches. In 2013, Zeiler beat out the competition with an error rate of just 12%.
For the next few months, Zeiler worked alone, pushing the limits of his neural networks and rewriting the code to turn it into a commercially viable product. He installed four servers in his apartment to crawl the Web for images to train his algorithms. At one point, his apartment got so hot that he had to leave his windows open in the middle of winter. By April 2014, Zeiler hired a second employee, and the two moved the servers to a New Jersey data center, where Clarifai continues to expand. In October 2014, he made the service available to developers. His first customer was a wedding lifestyle website called Style Me Pretty, which uses Clarifai to identify and categorize thousands of user-uploaded pictures and serves ads based on what&#8217;s in an image.
In 2015, Clarifai landed its first sizable investment: a $10 million round led by Union Square Ventures. The corporate coinvestors, who clearly understood the potential of what Zeiler was building, included Qualcomm, AI chip specialist Nvidia and, interestingly, Google&#8217;s venture arm. The following year, in a round led by Menlo Ventures, Clarifai raised another $30 million, at a valuation of $120 million, according to PitchBook. &#8220;Tech giants are working on similar products, but they don&#8217;t wake up every day living and dying on building the best image-recognition service,&#8221; Menlo partner Matt Murphy says. Clarifai now has 55 employees, including 10 dedicated to digging through the latest AI research so the company can stay current. Last year, it hired a veteran sales executive from Google&#8217;s enterprise unit as its chief customer officer.
A recent study by the consulting firm CapTech shows Clarifai remains competitive with, and in some cases outperforms, tech giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft in image recognition. But finding and keeping AI talent to maintain that position&#8211;let alone expand into new areas like audio recognition and beyond&#8211;won&#8217;t be easy. In February, Clarifai scored a longtime Google AI researcher, Andrea Frome, as its head of research, but she abruptly departed after only four months. Frome declined to speak about her departure, and Zeiler says it was the result of differing priorities. Access to data&#8211;lots of it&#8211;to &#8220;train&#8221; algorithms is also an area where Clarifai is likely to find itself at a permanent disadvantage compared to its much-larger rivals.
Clarifai&#8217;s latest tool trains AI models on smartphones, not in the cloud, where most AI systems do the bulk of their computing. On a recent day, in a San Francisco hotel lobby, Zeiler pulls out his cracked iPhone 6. As he moves the camera, the phone identifies all the objects around it&#8211;chairs, a fireplace, people, cars, as well as a MacBook that Zeiler had just trained it to recognize. It&#8217;s a tantalizing demonstration of the potential for deep learning as it moves into the most important device in people&#8217;s lives. &#8220;We&#8217;re only seeing the tip of the iceberg of what these systems will be able to do,&#8221; Zeiler says. &#8211; Written by <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-ga-track="contrib block byline">Aaron Tilley</a>, FORBES STAFF

Battling Giants

Taiwo Otiti and his twin brother had plans of settling and pursuing their careers in Canada, after completing their studies. Their father, a former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, had other plans in mind—that his sons would return to Nigeria. Otiti embraced the advice and left his brother behind: a decision he does not regret.
Otiti is now the country general manager of International Business Machines (IBM), in West Africa. He joined the technology and solutions provider in August 2010, four months before the firm’s centennial celebration. It was also the time when the firm was experiencing a decade of slow growth. The firm traces its roots to the 1880s, when a group of inventors who designed and patented breakthrough tabulating machines and punch clocks came together to form IBM. The firm’s success was accelerated by the construction of the legendary Watson Research Center. This marked the start of research labs throughout the globe that churned world-changing products in the technology space. For years IBM became synonymous with innovation. However, the emergence of venture capital backed entrepreneurs, such Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg, in the past two decades, overshadowed the post-World War Two success of IBM.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1557" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/DSC_0065-201x300.jpg" alt="" width="201" height="300" />
However, there is a dramatic shift today. Evidence is increasingly showing the dwindling growth of the venture capital-backed start-ups and the comeback of former technology giants. Scott Anthony, contributor to the Harvard Business Review, wrote, “…Apple’s inventiveness is no anomaly; it indicates a dramatic shift in the world of innovation. The revolution spurred by venture capitalists decades ago has created the conditions in which scale enables big companies to stop shackling innovation and start unleashing it.”
Because of its resources, IBM is able to embark on projects that many venture capital-backed startups cannot afford. Leveraging on past innovations, IBM strategists (or catalysts) are taking over were the blue chip start-ups have left off. IBM’s master inventor, Colin Harrison, is a pioneer strategist who recalibrated the company’s philosophy. He and fellow catalysts in the company conceptualized ‘Smarter Cities’ which is part of IBM’s ‘Smarter Planet’ initiative. The ‘Smarter Cities’ initiative saw IBM providing solutions in Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, Beijing, Dublin, Singapore and New York.
“…the company would offer infrastructure and services that will help cities save money and improve lives by managing energy, water, traffic, parking, public transit and other resources,” wrote Scott Anthony.
The Smarter Cities concept has become the hallmark of IBM. In 2011, the company invested $50 million in the three-year Smarter City Challenge, as part of its commitment to its expansion strategy in growth markets. In July, the technology and solutions provider dispatched a team of top employees from around the world to Accra, under its Corporate Citizen Corps program. The team spent a month with the Accra municipality officials consulting on making Accra a smarter city. A white paper report, based on the recommendations of the service core team for a smarter city, will be released in the first quarter of this year. Lagos and Cape Town were the only cities in Africa selected for the 2013 Smarter Cities Challenge grant.
Beyond these initiatives the firm is continuing to invest significantly in growth markets to expand capacity, develop talent and deepen its research and development.
“IBM spends just over $6 billion in R&amp;D every year [excluding other expenditures such as marketing] and there is nobody that spends that kind of money,” says Otiti.
This investment is driven by a strong cash flow, which stood at $16.6 billion in 2011. Part of the research and development expenditure was allocated to Africa and the first IBM research lab was built in Kenya. It is expected that this lab will support the science and technology skills base in Sub-Saharan Africa. This investment is justified by the constant revenue increase from growth markets. Cumulatively, these markets have contributed 22% of IBM’s geographic revenue in 2011, up from 11% in 2000 and company is expecting a further 30% growth by 2015.
In Nigeria, Otiti has expanded IBM’s market share through the diversification of company’s brands, which include services, software, information technology system, and research except finance services.
“Today, we control 70% of the high-end servers that run all the banking hosts in Nigeria, which gives us control of 80% of the transaction volume in banks. We have basically taken out SUN. There is only one bank remaining on SUN and four are running on HP,” says the optimistic IT expert.
The firm also partnered with Bharti Airtel to provide mobile services across 18 Sub-Saharan countries. In this partnership IBM runs the IT system of which Nigeria accounts close to a third.
IBM’s success is being buttressed by the decentralized structure that embodies creative leadership.
“IBM is a matrix organization. Under me, I have the four main brands, which is hardware, system and technology group (STG), software group, global technology services (GTS), which run things like strategic outsourcing and managing services and lastly the consulting group GBS (global business services). They report to me and they also report to verticals. The strength of IBM is the cross brand placement. We can actually provide solutions across board from consultancy down to delivery,” says Otiti.
Otiti is not a newcomer to the IT industry, having plied his trade with many banks in Nigeria. When he returned to Nigeria in the mid ’80s, the banking sector was going through major transformation. Over three decades, he moved from bank to bank. He first worked in the IT department for Citi Group. During his four-year stay, he started the software development work as part of the group’s localization program. He joined Fidelity Bank for three years and later Society General for a brief period.
The highlight of his career came with his appointment at First Bank: the oldest and one of the largest banks in Nigeria. His first task was to put in place a real-time online plan to centralize the bank’s 300 branches operations.
“One of the reasons they recruited me was because I was the first to do the first online ATMs at Society General. I was thus requested to give direction on how to do their channels infrastructure, which included things such as ATMs, Point of Sales (POS) and bankcards,” says Otiti who spent almost a decade at First Bank working on various projects that forever changed the Nigerian banking sector.
The efforts of his team led to the birth of Interswitch, which has enabled organizations and individuals to access their funds across 20 banks in Nigeria and across a variety of payment channels.
In his eight-year stay at First Bank he established an ATM consortium, which licensed Master Card to use its switch, and was also part of the team that negotiated Visa’s 20% acquisition of Valucard (now Unified Payment Services Ltd) and worked with the Central Bank of Nigeria on the vision 2012 payment system. He joined Afribank in 2009 for a short period before the bank’s closure.
Otiti wants the West African region to develop into an independent region like South Africa or Egypt.
“For West Africa to be an independent region, we should be able to generate over $200 million in revenues in the next five year,” says Otiti.

Tag: IBM

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Cure For Counterfeit Drugs?

Ford and IBM among quartet in Congo cobalt blockchain project

Battling Giants

The Return Of The Technocrat