Chika Uwazie’s TalentBase Is Revolutionizing HR And Payroll for SMEs In Nigeria

At 29, Chika Uwazie looks as sprightly and driven as you would expect a young entrepreneur to be. At her pitches, she reinforces her fluent descriptions of her startup’s novelty and potential with graceful gesticulations, as one attempting to draw out more jewels from a reservoir of passion welled up within her.  More often than not, she convinces her audience. Granted, her business idea is groundbreaking, its live form has been a hit of a venture, and there’s still a huge market for it to conquer. But Uwazie delivers these facts with a down-to-earth kind of zeal that charms spectators into buying her idea. Uwazie’s pioneering idea is TalentBase, a startup that builds Human Resource and payroll management software. Founded in 2015, it has helped over a hundred businesses, most of them SMEs, to automate the payment of their worker’s salaries, taxes, expenses, and leave management. TalentBase’s solutions mean that HR and payroll management tasks can be handled with just the click of a mouse or a tap on a screen.

The road to Entrepreneurship: psychology, the World Bank and a father’s influence

Uwazie says she loves working with people, and thinks that this was what drew her to HR. Born to Nigerian parents in the United States, she got her first degree in Psychology, and a Masters in Human Capital Development from Georgetown university. She went on to work at the World Bank, and then at ExxonMobil; for ten years, she has had to “live, breathe and eat HR”, but she finds it satisfying, even wonderful. But she also notes that she’s always had the conviction that she would walk her own path. Having watched her father move from a successful IT career at IBM to start his own business, she was certain that she would become an entrepreneur herself; the question for her was when. “Even when I was working with the World Bank, I was always working on startups”, she explained in an interview with the Guardian. “I really enjoyed that sort of thing.” The chance eventually came for Uwazie to launch out on her own. “It came about a couple of years ago with my partner Ozy who was working at a small investment firm”, she recalls. “We noticed that [businesses] were still using paper to do staff workers, they still used Excel to do their payroll calculations. We interviewed about two hundred HR managers and found out the problem [they had]: how do we manage internal HR processes with a simple affordable solution?” She had found a gaping need-hole in her own sector, and she proceeded to attack it with skill and fervour. In 2015, she and her colleague Ozioma Obiaka cofounded TalentBase.

Starting up

Uwazie didn’t have it all her way at first. The banks, which she needed to work with if her payroll software product was to be of any use, weren’t convinced that it was viable. It took a year for her to get her first bank on board the project. But there were other problems. “When I started this business (TalentBase), I thought I would just plug right into a regular payment system and start doing payroll”, she told the BBC. “I didn’t realize how broken the system was.” The existing payroll framework for most SMEs in Nigeria is a mishmash of manual paperwork, time-consuming Excel spreadsheet calculations, and informal hand-to-hand financial transactions. It didn’t take long for her to realize the enormity of the challenge: she was a visionary sailing upon rough, uncharted waters. But she remained undeterred, and in time her resolute pursuit of a tech-driven revolution of HR for Nigerian businesses began to bear good fruit. TalentBase has since partnered with more banks, and has seen its HR and payroll management system adopted by over 150 businesses, ranging from small enterprises employing about ten people to a company staffed by thousands of workers. It has also received funding from investors, beginning with Venture Garden Group, a data management software producer. In 2016, TalentBase was one of 44 startups selected from around the world to take part in an accelerator program organized by silicon valley venture capital platform 500 Startups, and received $150,000 in funding from the programme. How TalentBase works The TalentBase system helps businesses manage payroll, HR and expenses in one place. With it, payments can be remitted directly into employees’ accounts, taxes deducted automatically, and leave, travel and non-travel expenses tracked. Even if the person to be paid has no bank account (as is the case with 40 percent of Nigerians), they could have money transferred into a mobile wallet created for them. They’ll be able to run it like an actual bank account with a credit card, making normal payments and withdrawing cash from their electronic wallets at ATMs. Because of TalentBase’s seamless nature, its tax deduction solution has made it a forward-looking ally to the government in its drive to widen its tax base and increase tax revenues. The startup could become an even greater player in this respect in the future, as it seeks to expand beyond the approximately 10,000 client company employees whose HR details it currently manages. But she’s not done…yet Uwazie has two big goals at the moment. First, she wants to achieve “total African domination”. Not content with lording it over a new industry back home in Nigeria, she looks forward to disrupting HR processes on a continent-wide scale. “We’re looking to go into Francophone (French-speaking Africa),” she says, “and then to East Africa, beginning with Kenya.” There’s a whole lot to gain: 40 million SMEs across Africa are waiting to be lifted into the age of automated HR management. The market is worth $24 billion- enough to make any entrepreneur’s heart leap. Fortunately, the banks she’s partnered with appear to be backing her plans. But beyond succeeding at her personal projects, Uwazie desires to inspire other women to chase down their dreams, especially in technology. “There aren’t a lot of people that look like me (a woman in the tech space)” she says. “I want to be an inspiration to other women. I want them to see that being in technology is possible.” It’s obvious that women can succeed in technology. Chika Uwazie is simply proving that there are more ways for them to do so than just being awkward, nerdy, bespectacled coders. People-oriented HR consultants can have a good shot at it too. Featured image credit: The Guardian.ng