Author: Walter Hayward

As a self-described “dreamer, hustler and leader”, Dare Okoudjou heads up MFS Africa, one of the continent’s largest mobile payment platforms. Currently, it’s seen as the best gateway to send money to mobile wallets in Africa. The company covers 180 million mobile money recipients across all major networks. Their mission? To develop and distribute tailored yet scalable mobile financial solutions to underserved markets across Africa. MFS Africa is unique in that it connects mobile money systems to each other and to money transfer organisations, banks and other financial institutions, enabling money remittances to and from mobile money accounts.

Tell us more about your growth journey with MFS Africa.

I would characterise my growth journey – and that of the company itself – in three stages: Dreamer, hustler and leader. As a small team of dreamers, all we really had were a vision and belief that the average African consumer needed a full suite of payment and banking solutions accessible from their mobile wallet, whatever the network, whatever the country. But how do you make that universal solution work for such a fragmented market? We assembled the right core team of dreamers to bring the vision to reality.

Before we knew it, we were hustlers — armed with a product and passion, we started chasing opportunities in every direction. We introduced cutting-edge, first-in-class mobile financial services across Africa, and sealed deals with the continent’s largest names in mobile telecoms and financial services. With a lot of blood, sweat, tears – and especially creativity – we built Africa’s largest digital payments platform. Today, I’m proud to say that we’re leaders. Our growth has been dizzying, both in terms of key metrics – such as partners connected and transaction value processed – but also in terms of headcount and budget. Now we face challenges that are beyond the scope of the dreamer and ill-suited to the hustler mindset.

Do you think creativity and business go hand in hand?

I can’t think of a single business today that doesn’t rely on creativity, whether in the design of the product or service itself, the systems and technology that support that product or service, or in the delivery and marketing to the end consumer. Especially in the African context, where we can’t take for granted the homogeneity of customer needs and smooth infrastructure that is often assumed elsewhere. Our diversity of client profiles, infrastructure challenges and multilingual environments mean that creativity is critical for any business to succeed at scale.

How does technology affect your creative processes?

Our business is at the cutting edge of mobile payments technology and we’ve seen a number of transformations in the last five to 10 years. In the early years (we got started in 2010), our main creative problem-solving challenges were around some of the clunkier elements of telecoms infrastructure — for instance, designing a service that could withstand latency on multiple different client platforms, while delivering a unified user experience — all on a USSD menu and without timing out. These days, the core functionalities of mobile money are becoming more and more harmonised so some of these fundamental challenges have fallen away. This has allowed us to focus our creativity on solving more complex problems and more sophisticated products.

Telecommunications technology has also changed customer expectations. National borders are no longer relevant limitations on communication, entertainment, and media, and we may even struggle to remember that they used to be. We’re striving to bring that same seamlessness to payments and financial services — to truly make borders immaterial. This requires constant re-evaluating of assumed constraints and re-imagining of solutions.

How does creativity add to a company’s authenticity?

We value creativity in problem solving when it is anchored in empathy — empathy for our end user. We are tackling a complex and important challenge — how do we bring the global digital economy to the most financially and technologically marginalised users? As someone who has lived all sides of the remittances experience personally, the problems we are tackling are not abstract to me. This means that I find it easy to empathise with the end user and eventually see creative solutions that others less close to these experiences may miss.

One of our strengths and sources of authenticity and creativity at MFS Africa is the diversity of our staff. We are a truly pan-African company with 22 nationalities represented on the team and well over 25 languages spoken. Almost everyone has experienced remittances firsthand, as well as the experience of being a foreigner somewhere. The humility of struggling to express yourself and grit that comes with having to figure things out in a new environment — these are critical elements to our creative and authentic perspective as a company.

With a mission to transform the notion of office space as we know it, Spacefinish provides agile workspace solutions across Africa that boosts productivity, innovation and collaboration. From Fortune 500s to startups, the company’s human-centric approach aims to meet the needs of all business types and help them reach higher levels of excellence in their fields.

As part of our Most Creative People in Business edition, Founder Remi Dada talks exclusively to Fast Company SA about the growth of his business and the importance of creativity as an entrepreneur.

Tell us more about your growth journey with Spacefinish

From a young age, I always wanted to be a creator of things that people could touch, feel, and experience. This led to me choosing a career in a creative field like architecture. One day, as a young architect, I noticed how disconnected I was from the solutions my employer provided its clients. This disconnection created a void where I felt my work had no impact or sense of contributing to the greater good.

Because of that, I took a career detour and ended up landing a dream job working at Google. During my 5 year career at Google, I got an opportunity of a lifetime to design the Google office in Lagos, Nigeria (in a third-party space) as part of a 20% project since Google allows its employees to spend 20% of their time working on a passion-related project. The results of the new office design were great and personally fulfilling. The office now had dedicated spaces for social interaction which allowed for better collaboration. The playful nature of the design meant people felt more inspired, and dynamic workspaces now accommodated both open and focused work styles which led to more productivity amongst teammates. All this allowed me to get a new perspective on the transformational effects that a well-designed workspace could have on employees.

Shortly afterwards, I came to the realisation that this problem wasn’t unique to our office but a problem that a lot of businesses face in Nigeria. Convinced that this was a problem worth spending the rest of my life solving, I left a dream job at Google to set out to start Spacefinish, a design company that creates innovative workspaces for businesses. Over the last 18 months since starting Spacefinish, we have grown to 20 employees and over 100 contractors. We have also been lucky to work with brands such as Google, PWC, DHL and Standard Bank, to name a couple. Though exciting, we realise that we are just at the beginning of our journey to transform workspaces around the world, and we are optimistic about what the future holds.

Do you think creativity and business can go hand in hand?

I believe that creativity is a catalyst for innovative business solutions that drive entire industries forward. Ironically, we have been told time and time again that the business place is a rigid environment that does not value creative thinking. I, unfortunately, experienced this during my job search after business school. A lot of conventional companies turned me down because prior to business school, I had a degree in architecture and not a prerequisite business background. I only started to make headway in my job search when I sought out tech companies that appreciated diverse backgrounds in their employees. However, I believe that things are beginning to shift and it is all as a result of increased adoption of creativity in the workspace. For example, here in Nigeria, old industries like the banking sectors have started to invest in providing creative workspaces for their newly acquired fintech departments. I believe businesses are beginning to understand that creativity is the building block of innovation, and without it, they lose their competitive edge.

How is technology transforming your industry? Has it affected your creative processes?

Technology is definitely transforming the Design-Build industry. For example, we are now in an age where we can create entire buildings with 3D printing technology and bring digital designs to life using Augmented Mixed Reality in ways that were not possible before. These are very exciting times for our industry! At Spacefinish, we too are beginning to deploy tech that influences how we approach design. One of the biggest problems we are trying to solve with tech is talent sourcing and management. In Nigeria, access to talented architects and contractors is very cost prohibitive. To address this problem, Spacefinish is building a talent matching platform that pairs whole project teams to paying clients at an affordable rate. To achieve this, we are creating locally relevant modular design solutions that our community of architects and contractors can build upon, thus allowing them to design and cost more efficiently while reducing their design billable hours, as a result driving down the cost for the clients. We are excited about the possibilities this platform brings to the industry because it opens up access to talent and allows us to scale our impact.

How does creativity add to a company’s authenticity?

I believe creativity is what makes a brand stand out from the crowd. Odds are whatever solution your company offers, there are 10 other companies offering similar solutions. But the way you differentiate yourself is in how you go about providing such solutions, and this is where creativity comes into play. In business, it is the ability to bring to market a new way of looking at old problems. Companies that are able to do this end up building a great deal of authenticity.

Let us in on the personal habits you believe inspire your creativity.

I watch videos of people who have built great companies, and I track the transition point from when they were just starting off and were young, and green (similar to me), to when their companies grew fast and how they handled that scaling period. These are very rare moments to capture, and they humanise these legends, which inspires me and reminds me that it is possible to achieve similar success.

I also consume a lot of design content and use tools like Pinterest to archive inspirational elements which I always revisit when I am in need of a dose of creativity. I work remotely every Thursday and I try to find unique locations that fuel my creativity. When I need to clear my head and reset, I meditate, exercise and take long walks by myself. I also try to meet and interact with different groups of people, across various ethnicities, generations, and social standings. I believe that doing this has taken me a step closer to understanding people better and creating solutions they truly care about.

What is your business ethos?

At Spacefinish, we put the customer first and are always obsessing over creating a happy and fulfilling work environment for them to meet their business goals in. We truly believe that with design, we can influence how people experience the workspace. To ensure this we focus on creating workspaces that allow our clients to meet their P.I.C goals (productivity, innovation, and collaboration). As a result, we are constantly asking ourselves does this workspace allow our clients to be more productive, does it truly inspire their employees to think outside the box and be more innovative, and finally does it encourage appropriate human collaboration to allow our clients succeed? Those three pillars drive the work that we do at Spacefinish.

Today’s challenges require creative solutions from people who are unafraid to think differently. Glenn Gillis is the CEO of Sea Monster, a company which uses animation, games and immersion technologies – like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) – to shift business and social outcomes at scale.

By using a combination of visual storytelling and games, Sea Monster provides structured ways for people to solve change management challenges, engage with customers and achieve financial education goals, just to mention a few of the big, wicked problems the company likes to help address.

“Sea Monster was born out of the restructure of a big entertainment business,” says Glenn. “We knew the future of marketing and education is about the story and voluntary engagement, and wanted to bring those skills, including the production efficiency of the entertainment industry, to bear on education and marketing. Globally, there are very few companies that combine animation and gaming in this space.”

Sea Monster has proven that animation and games are serious instruments for change within large organisations. “Eight years later we’re still around, and the quality of the narrative we’re having with clients has massively improved.

“They understand the costs better and we’re working with big businesses on real, strategic transformational processes in a way that is nuanced and story driven. We’re not seen as a hipster fringe movement – what we do is recognised as a proper part of their arsenal to drive their business goals.”

Fast Company SA sat down with Glenn to discuss Sea Monster’s journey and his insights into running a wildly creative company.

What has been the most innovative project Sea Monster has worked on?

Pick n Pay Supercards are back and out to educate and delight kids once again. This new iteration is based around the Cricket World Cup, and provides hours of educational content and learning about the game so many of us love. We’re very excited to be involved and are particularly pleased that the Women’s Team has been given great prominence.

Super Cards is all about collecting, teaching, sharing and showing off how much you know about the game. The app (available on The App Store and the Play Store) uses AR to bring the players to life in 3D, there is a great quiz plus a new mini cricket game that pits players against the best men’s and women’s bowlers to see how many runs you can get.

We think it’s great that education is being seen as a business opportunity. Kids get hours of entertainment and learn as they go, and Pick n Pay will hopefully be as happy with the business results as they were last time, while using Super Cards to deliver great value their customers. In tough times, this is what people are after. The value Pick n Pay is providing is in more than just price reductions, it’s hours of entertainment as a reward for their customers’ loyalty.

What is your opinion on new AR/VR tech and its business applications?

The technologies are amazing but they do not solve problems in and of themselves. AR is a much more mature technology – we’ve been using it for eight years now. VR is only just starting to emerge – even though we have industrial applications for it, for example, the VR experience we developed for ArcelorMittal that tests its employees for a fear of heights.

With AR, the technology is ready, the devices are out there but businesses are the limiting factor – they don’t yet fully understand how AR can drive their goals. We believe AR is going to fundamentally change the way we connect the real world with the digital world. It’s not a passing fad but rather a new way to think about everything from brands to social interaction.

Do you think creativity and business can go hand-in-hand?

What’s important to remember is that many people equate creativity with artistic ability, and being able to express yourself artistically is a powerful form of creativity. But for me, creativity is making non-obvious connections and seeing patterns between differing concepts.

Businesses today need creativity more than ever. Large corporations often sit with all the ingredients they need to fundamentally bake a new cake but ultimately fail to do so. It’s about saying ‘imagine if we could connect this capability to that one, and deliver something meaningful to clients’. It doesn’t matter if you call it creativity or innovation – it’s about creating value for customers and shareholders, and if we can wrap that up in a visually appealing story-driven way, even better!

You need to ignite people’s imaginations. Creativity can also be found in how we use narratives to appeal to our audiences and get them to relate to characters, which then drives behaviour change. How you use new technology or even existing technologies in new ways is where it gets really interesting.

How does creativity add to a company’s authenticity?

Power is shifting nowadays because people have more connectivity and platforms to express themselves than ever before. Communication about and with brands is no longer a one-way connection. Brands need to be engaged in social media and be a part of narratives rather than dictating them. This has to be consistent – you run the risk of coming across as insincere if you aren’t.

Brands have to be authentic, they need to be more human not more corporate, which includes admitting when they make mistakes. Many of them struggle with this. A brand has always been what customers say about it when they’re not in the room but now they can amplify that across all sorts of channels. If you weren’t authentic before, you have no choice but to be so now.

What is your business ethos?

Ultimately, Sea Monster sells something that doesn’t yet exist – every knowledge/creative business does the same. We sell trust and professional credibility. We stand up in the boardrooms of the biggest banks in South Africa and say, ‘We have a sense of what you are trying to achieve, we know what impact it will have and how to drive your business goals but we don’t know exactly what that will look like’. You have to trust the process and each other, if we are to truly unlock value together.

With our company, what you see is what you get – we sell the sizzle and deliver the steak. It requires trust and open relationships. It requires us owning the issues as they come up and working through them with the client as well as internally.

Maybe I’m being naive – maybe it is a ‘hard-bargaining, nickel-and-dime’ approach that makes people wealthy but that’s not something we’re interested in. We would rather have a few clients and shift the dial on the social and business objectives they want to achieve.

Contact:
Sea Monster
www.seamonster.co.za[email protected]
021 461 0365