Co-founder and Co-CEO of Eyowo, Yomi Adedeji said he was not formally notified of the digital bank’s license revocation by the CBN. The CEO disclosed this at a fireside session titled: Failing Forward; Transforming Failure into Success. The session was part of the 2024 Catalysing Conversations event which was held in Lagos.
The CEO, who said he only learned of his bank’s license revocation from the news like everyone else, said the panic and uncertainty which came with the development led to a really tough time for him.
“It was a really tough time, especially because of the level of uncertainty that came with waking up in the morning and all of a sudden you hear that your license has been taken away from you in the news. It is not like you got a letter from the central bank. You just woke up in the morning and you are trying to go to work, preparing for the day and you realise that you have no license to operate. I was literally going through my phone in the morning and I learned that our license had been taken away from us. So there was no formal notification that said you know what; tomorrow morning we are going to make an announcement,” Yomi Adedeji said.
The Co-CEO likened it to being on a six-hour flight, and just as the plane was about to land, the passengers heard that there was turbulence and some voice coming from the address system saying the aircraft just lost an engine. Generally, panic will ensue which was exactly what happened in the Eyowo case.
“That generally obviously kicked off a lot of panic from customers. The phones started ringing, people needed their money. There are hundreds of thousands of customers whose money is stuck in the bank. We did not know beforehand so there was literally no response planned at the time this was happening,” Adedeji said.
Eyowo’s ordeal and lessons learned
In early 2023, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) revoked Eyowo’s license along with the licenses of 46 other microfinance organisations. The licenses, according to the apex bank, were withdrawn because the banks were inactive, insolvent, failed to submit returns, shut down, or stopped conducting banking business as they were licensed for longer than six months.
Eventually, Eyowo would lay off most of its staff with the company telling them that this was the end of Eyowo as they know it.
The digital bank would later clarify that it was not a shutting down as it was only pivoting into providing “financial connectedness and intelligence for everyday money and living choices to everyone with a smartphone.”
In March 2024, the company announced that its license had been reinstated with approval in principle. By June, the company said its license was fully reinstated by the apex bank. And through all of these, Yomi Adedeji said the major lesson learned has been resilience.
“In terms of lessons learned, I think it gives a real new meaning to resilience to me as a person. You think about resilience as you can go through difficulty, you can overcome challenges, I have been an entrepreneur all my life, and I have never worked anywhere, I have done this for about 17 years so I have seen things. I can go through things. But when you are going through what you do not understand, it is a different type of ball game. A lesson about resilience would be just really thinking about what you do now. And as you do, you get more informed,” he said.
Asked why he still believes in the Nigerian market despite everything he has been through, the Eyowo Co-CEO said the upsides of the market are really great and it is literally a land of opportunity.
“In a market where the median age is about 18.6 years old, we are bound to grow to about 400 million people by 2050 which is in 26 years. And almost 50 per cent of them are going to be (less than) 22 years old, I think we are primarily just getting started and if we are operating in the digital space what that also means is that in 25 or 26 years you can imagine the amount of digital penetration that could have happened. I am here for literally the long run and perhaps these are just like the early days of it,” he finished.
The post “I learned about Eyowo’s license revocation from the news, no formal notice was sent” – CEO Yomi Adedeji first appeared on Technext.