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Narrator: Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Saturday March 25 2017. Chukwuma Eleje, father of four, says goodbye to his family as he sets out to make deliveries for the day. Chukwuma works for one of the third-party logistics partners of eCommerce giant, Jumia. But little does he know that it’s his last goodbye.

Chukwuma ended up being murdered by 2 young men who ordered 2 iPhone 7 devices using Pay on Delivery, a popular payment option on Nigerian eCommerce platforms. After brutally snuffing the life of Mr. Eleje, the young men tied Chukwuma up and stuffed him into a septic tank.

The unfortunate incident happened at a time when Nigerians were still coming to terms with online shopping. Pay on Delivery was the preferred option, given the level of distrust and fear they feel. But the murder incident didn’t look good on the industry.

The question is if they took Pay on Delivery out of the equation in those early days, what were the chances of survival for eCommerce businesses in Nigeria?

Naturally, these platforms began to explore safer options as it became clearer that Pay on Delivery wouldn’t be sustainable in the long haul. Soon, escrow services became the perfect replacement but they were quite unpopular at the time.

Somewhere in Ghana in 2017, on the floors of the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) accelerator programme, three Nigerians, Ehi Aigiomawu, Ibrahim Oladele, and Tomisin Adeshiyan came up with the idea for a bespoke escrow service. They named it Vesicash. Globally, the eCommerce sector is predicted to be worth $6.5 billion by 2022, and Vesicash plans to make it safe for Nigerian online businesses

Ehi Aigiomawu: We found out that buyers could not trust the sellers to deliver the right items, so they would prefer Pay on Delivery instead. And sellers, on the other hand, people who sell, are not really convinced that “oh, if I ship this item, am I really sure this person will pay me? Won’t it be an issue later on?”. So most of the time, this was leading to lots of unfulfilled orders. So how do we solve this problem? We knew that the main issue that these two people — the buy and the seller — had was trust. So they couldn’t trust each other. So we asked, “how could we build a platform to foster trust between these sets of people so that they can transact smoothly?”

Narrator: That’s Ehi Aigiomawu, Vesicash Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer.

Ehi Aigiomawu: We did a couple of research in different spaces, and we found out that the problem was not just in the eCommerce space, it was also in the freelance sector, it was also in the real estate sector, and in other sectors too. So, we narrowed down and we decided that we’re going to solve this problem, and we decided that escrow was a way for us to solve this problem, to foster trust between buyer and seller. So, we immediately registered the company called Vesicash with the sole purpose of guaranteeing payment security for digital transactions across Africa.

Narrator: So, they pitched the idea and it sounded good.

Ehi Aigiomawu: MEST liked it but then, we had to come back to Nigeria to validate the idea… MEST is in Ghana. Nigeria is a bigger market than Ghana so we had to come back to Nigeria, to actually validate the idea here in Nigeria, to ensure that it’s actually a problem that is not just in Ghana but, b...