Somewhere in
Lagos’ district of Isolo, there’s a manufacturing facility with machines spewing out thousands of smart cards every working day. It might be considered just another one of hundreds of industrial scale production lines scattered across Nigeria’s commercial capital; but it isn’t.
SecureID
That’s because it’s owned by
SecureID, West Africa’s first smart card producing company. This wholly
Nigerian brand also doubles as
the continent’s first end-to-end SIM card manufacturer – a status which it achieved with its SIM card production lines, which it
launched in 2016.
SecureID’s capabilities means that it’s able to (and does) produce bank debit and credit cards, and identity cards, as well as SIM cards. Its manufacturing plant is reported to have the capacity to produce 200 million cards per annum. The company’s executives have said that they intend it to serve as “the nucleus for a high tech manufacturing trade hub”- perhaps a way of saying they plan to expand it.
They certainly would be reasonable to consider expansion if market demand convinces them that it’s right to do so. Things are apparently moving in this direction, and converging well for SecureID. A rapid move towards more cashless financial transactions has made bank cards more prominent; there’s an ongoing government-led drive for Nigerians to get formal state-sanctioned identification (the National ID card); and voters need to have personalized machine readable cards to be eligible to vote.
SecureID is filling these needs for Nigerians, but it’s also doing so for many other countries as well. It produces cards for clients in several other sub-Saharan states, where card production technology is absent. While there are a few other card manufacturing companies elsewhere in Africa, SecureID has enough blue sea to swim in. The continent, with a growing population that’s being plugged into modern personalized digital technology, is vast and largely underserved. There’s still plenty of barely touched market space to conquer.
history
Kofo Akinkugbe, SecureID’s CEO, started the company from a small unit within
Interface Technologies, an older company which she had run for almost a decade. Her initial attempts to lay out the groundwork for a local smart card and digital security company was met with skepticism. She’s quoted as saying that her foreign partners, from whom she sought to acquire the machines needed to make the cards, were amused at her ambition. But she pressed on nonetheless.
SecureID began embedding RFID chips in cards in 2010. With the help of the
Bank of Industry (BoI), it completed a smart card manufacturing plant in 2014, which was launched the following year. The plant was the first south of the Sahara to produce polycarbonate, the material used in smart cards. With its establishment, SecureID is now able to not just couple these card parts (as it did before), but also create them from a more basic state.
SecureID also opened a SIM card production line in 2016, which is helping to fill a space that has previously been covered by foreign companies. Mobile telecommunications firms in Nigeria are now able to get their SIM cards put together within the country, and not incur expenses from importing them.
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This article was first published on 2nd July 2018
ikenna-nwachukwu
Ikenna Nwachukwu holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He loves to look at the world through multiple lenses- economic, political, religious and philosophical- and to write about what he observes in a witty, yet reflective style.
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