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Nigeria Should Take Advantage of Convergence- Oguntonade

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Deji Oguntonade is the managing director of 3Line Card Management Company Ltd, a company set up to bridge the gap in service delivery. Oguntonade reputed for his strength in innovation, human capital development and a never say die attitude has nearly 20 years work experience in the ICT sector. He spoke to hilary okeke.

3line Card Management and e-Payment
3Line Card Management Company is coming to the Nigeria e-payment scene at the right time. We believe what this economy needs now is a company that focuses on delivering more value to the existing payment card users in the country. 3line is poised to deliver specialized value adding business solutions that make electronic payment easy, simple and affordable by the vast retail market especially the unbanked and underbanked. We have identified needs and gaps and we have positioned to remedy such. We are not just another technology company but strictly a payment solutions company. We have also acquired installed capacity to support these solutions and manage the entire life cycle of cards right from design to production, personalization, etc.
Deadline on Issuance of Chip and Pin Card
There are lots of factors to be considered for a successful migration from magnetic stripe cards to the so called chip and pin cards. Chief among this is the upgrade of the current infrastructure, especially channels such as ATMs and PoS to make them compatible for this new card technology. This is a capital intensive investment for banks and other technology service providers in e-payment. Also, the cost of the cards themselves far surpass that of the cards currently in use, hence replacing these cards will also generate issues like who ought to bear the cost – customer or bank? Another question to ask is if chip and pin is really needed in all and every situation. By and large, the greater security offered on the chip and pin platform will eventually drive the market in the direction of compliance. What we envisage is a gradual, rather than sudden compliance.
EMV Chip and Pin Card and Fraudsters
Because of the additional security requirements implemented on the EMV compliant cards, the nefarious activities of fraudsters will be reduced to a very great extent. Also, the cost involved in attempting to break the security is prohibitive enough to make such activities no longer unprofitable as against the case as we know it today. Yes, EMV will reduce card-based frauds.
Interoperability among Switching Companies
I think the absence of proper regulatory framework for this sector is responsible for this phenomenon. Unless something is done to reverse this trend, the growth of the Nigerian e-payment sector will remain rudimentary and at best stunted. We cannot compete in a global world and major global players in electronic payments will not be able to participate adequately in an economy of several disjointed switches. There is a need to streamline and regulate where necessary. The onus still lies very much with government agencies to chart the direction for compliance in the switching business. 3Line has positioned to take advantage of existing technology without necessarily acting as another technology provider. Nigerian users need more values for their card usage and that is what we are willing to deliver.
Freedom Card
The Freedom Card brand is at the core of 3line value proposition and offering. It is the flagship for 3line products. Freedom Card brand’s essence is borne out of a strong philosophy that for every human being, choice is the most desirable form of Freedom – choice of location, achievement, lifestyle, convenience, security, etc. People are simply desirous to live truly free.
The brand has therefore, positioned itself as an enabler for achieving this aspiration of the innate desire for Freedom. Freedom Card brand’s posture therefore resonates this attribute inside out; from our work culture to our various product offerings. We see ourselves as Freedom ‘fighters’ whose ambition is to bring exciting lifestyle experience to Nigerians through innovative and cutting-edge products that truly enable them achieve more, do more, believe more in themselves, especially those excluded from access to financial services and products. Freedom Card believes that there are limitless possibilities and that by being non-conformist, we can question the status quo and discover hitherto unconceivable solutions to make everyday life more fun-filled, colourful, exciting and vibrant. It is in line with the above brand essence that our products and services seek to address every aspect of daily lives of Nigerians with a view to enabling them live truly free using the e-payment platform, while forging deep connection with the Nigerian culture.
Freedom Card is our flagship brand. It is the umbrella name for a bouquet of card based products such as the prepaid card products and the chip and pin cards. An example of application of the prepaid card is in the Freedom Gift Card, which was launched into the Nigerian market last December. This was received with a lot of enthusiasm as it offers the public an alternative and more convenient means of sharing gifts. There are several other products in the Freedom Card suite that will be released over time.
High Downtime at ATMs
It is no longer news that the state of infrastructure in Nigeria is very deplorable. It needs to be understood that for ATMs to work, several infrastructure providers are involved in the value chain right from telecoms to power, IT and even physical security. Once there is a breakdown at one of these points, the chain is broken. You will agree with me that it is not an easy task to control this entire infrastructure without occasional hitches given the state of the entire Nigerian society and other socio-economic factors. For instance, alternative power is supplied per ATM location; separate telecoms is deployed to ensure that ATMs are up and running. To reduce these breakdowns, efforts must be made in appropriate quarters to improve each of the ancillary infrastructures.
e-Commerce Solution
It is something that we would love to do, although it has not fully taken off. The learning curve may be very steep but we are willing to take it in strides and believe that it will catch on with time. The developed economies that we refer to as examples today also took a while to get where they are today. The cultural and social transformation needed to bring about similar change in Nigeria may take some time but the change is inevitable. Much improvement has been seen in the last decade and the trend is still continuing. We would embark on necessary consumer enlightenment programmes; create enough values to give the consumer a need to adopt eCommerce as against other traditional means of conducting transactions. We plan to develop our solutions around the lifestyle of consumers as against forcing them to adopt a standard. So, we are still building up capacity and most likely by the end of the year, we would start having some inputs into eCommerce.
e-Data and e-Identity
Aside from ePayment, the next logical thing that Nigeria will latch on to is convergence of many activities and services that are available in silos today. For instance, health data, vehicle data, insurance details, even bio-data can very well be carried on cards. The adoption of the chip and pin era will further make this possible and achievable. We intend to make carrying such sensitive personal data very portable, secure and presentable in a uniform format to facilitate verification. 3Line is in a position to deliver this as part of its value proposition.
Auto-Reg Scheme
Well, the major achievement is having vehicle details registered electronically and accessible from a central location. Data have been recorded, saved, made available to those that should have access to these data – LASTMA officials, Federal Road Safety agents, Police or Vehicle Insurance company. Now, those records can be accessed easily since they have been compiled and kept in a databank.


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

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InDrive, an e-hailing firm, announced app upgrades as well as new safety details for riders and drivers.

InDrive’s updated Safety Centre now allows its support team to contact a user’s trusted contacts in emergencies and the number of trusted contacts has been increased from one to five. InDrive says that it is also easier for its support team to share information with emergency services, among other things.

Also, the company said by clicking on the app’s SOS-button, users can see all the information needed when requesting help or reporting an incident – along with a button to call police or ambulance services.

InDrive’s app design has also been updated to improve user experience, making the Safety Centre more visible, it said.

Further, the company said: “inDrive is also testing photo sharing and automatic translation of chat messages, which have been added to the in-app chat function. These make it easier for the driver and rider to clarify the pickup point, and communicate in the same language while traveling.

“Passengers and drivers stay within the application when using these features, so there’s no need to use across other platforms, thereby protecting personal information. For now the feature is currently being tested by a limited number of users to improve its functionality before it is rolled out to everyone.”

The announcement today comes after the company recently revealed it had expanded its financing arrangement with General Catalyst to $146 million, allowing the company to engage in product upgrades, extend its service offerings, and enter new markets in Africa.


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NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

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Telecommunications operators in the country are gearing up for another round of disconnections of phone lines for subscribers who have failed to link their National Identification Numbers (NIN) with their SIM cards.

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

The disconnection which will happen Friday, March 29, following a directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) requiring all registered SIMs lacking proper NIN linkage to be either corrected or completely disconnected from networks.

The ongoing process, which commenced on February 28, 2024, is part of the government’s efforts to curb criminal activities like banditry and kidnapping, contributing to enhancing national security.

There are indications of a potential third phase in April 2024.

Operators have reportedly cooperated with the NCC in executing the directive, affirming their commitment to national security objectives and assuring full compliance by the specified deadlines.

The second phase will target subscribers with five or more SIMs from a single operator lacking verified NIN-SIM linkages.

The third phase, set to commence on April 15, will focus on subscribers with four SIMs or fewer and unverified NINs.

While telecom companies seek a review and extension of the April deadline for the third phase, indications from the NCC suggest a steadfast adherence to the established timelines.

The first phase saw the barring of 40 million lines, comprising around 17 million active SIMs without NIN submissions and 23 million inactive SIMs lacking NINs over the past year.

 

 

 

 


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