“We have 99.9999999999999% uptime” is cliche these days because it’s a very common claim that most companies make about their services. There’s a very good reason why. 99% service uptime makes a world of difference in your business and indeed any business, so all companies strive to provide it. Some end up achieving it, some get quite close, some don’t. Still, it’s the goal.

Why do we strive to achieve a 99% Payout service uptime? We are customer-focused.

We have 5 core values here at Flutterwave and the very first one is: “we are customer-focused.”

A study produced by Xero analyzed more than 10 million invoices from about 150,000 Australian small businesses tied late payments to revenue growth with those getting paid late growing one third slower than those getting paid on time. 

Intuit released a study showing the impact that cash flow challenges are having on small businesses worldwide. The company surveyed 3,000 businesses in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and India. Among the findings:

• 69% of SMBs say cash flow concerns keep them awake at night
• 32% say they cannot always pay their vendors on time
• 43% at least occasionally fail to pay their employees on time. 

Note that 32% say that they can’t pay their vendors on time. Most of those vendors are small businesses too. Payment delays whether collection i.e the business collecting payment or payout i.e the business paying customers and/or vendors is detrimental to the health of businesses. The health of your business is our priority.

How do we achieve a 99% Payout service uptime? We create and innovate.

Yes, you probably guessed right, “we create and innovate” is also one of our core values at Flutterwave. A common experience we have with new hires that aren’t in marketing or other departments that seem “creative,” is that they wonder how they can create and innovate. How do you create and innovate if you’re hired to help ensure businesses process their payouts seamlessly?

innovate: make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.”the company’s failure to diversify and innovate competitively”

– Oxford English Dictionary

First thing they learn is that “we create and innovate” isn’t about beautiful designs or some interesting videos. It’s about approaching every task, every instruction, with the goal of creating better methods and introducing new ideas to make the process better. Creating and innovating is for everyone and every process.

299 million transactions to 569 million transactions: The NIBSS story

Q3 2019, 299 million online real-time transactions were recorded, by NIBSS and for the same quarter in 2020, 569 million transactions were recorded. A 90% increase in transaction volume in just one year. The dollar value of these transactions being $68.3 billion in 2019 vs $116 billion in 2020. A 70% increase.

The biggest ride hailing company in the world, Uber, trusts us to not only collect money from customers on their behalf, but also to pay out the right amount as at when due, to their drivers. As you can imagine, any payout delays to their drivers, has significant negative impact on their business. It’s not a simple task but we create and innovate right? Our system has effectively handled this for years and will continue to because of the steps we’ve put in place.

Creating and Innovating for us, goes beyond the work we do on our platform, it includes identifying partnerships that represent our core values. It’s about leveraging partnerships that allow us to create and innovate around payment challenges for our businesses. This is why we lean on the NIBSS infrastructure that has steadily grown 299 million transactions to 569 million transactions, not just for Uber, but for all our businesses that require the same service in Nigeria.

However, it doesn’t stop there. We know that no system is 100% perfect and this is why we currently have an additional backup payout infrastructure with them that has ensured good service delivery to you.

NIBSS is one of our many service providers. Our service providers have one thing in common: they have a goal of maintaining a stable payment infrastructure and they innovate around payment issues to ensure the 99.9% uptime that keeps our businesses in business.

That’s it, that’s our secret.