One of the most important advantages of the internet is making the world a global village. This has revolutionized how people learn, work, buy and sell, love, and experience things with others.
While businesses of all sizes are already leveraging the many advantages, many are still left out or not exploring it to its full potential. A new online portal, the Integrated Micro, Small & Medium Enterprise (iMSME) ecosystem is being developed to close this gap. iMSME will be a portal open to businesses of all sizes, with a focus on SMEs, designed to facilitate communication among businesses and to build relationships with potential partners, clients, and customers. The portal is a product of a partnership endeavor between business solutions company, ITScope Consulting, a technology and communications company, Tingo Inc., the parent company of Tingo Mobile PLC, Africa’s leading agri-fintech company, and the federal government of Nigeria through the Small & Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria, an establishment charged with the responsibility of stimulating, monitoring and coordinating the development of the micro, small and medium enterprises sub-sector.
The portal aims to revolutionize many of the processes of businesses of all sizes and across multiple sectors of the economy. A key feature of the portal is MyQ, an appointment scheduling system that allows businesses autonomy to control how partners and clients book appointments, thereby reducing cost while also increasing efficiency. Another feature that will do this is i-Chatbot, which allows businesses to automate the customer contact matrix, at a fraction of the cost of employing support staff, providing fast and business-specific answers to frequently asked questions. There will also be an e-Wallet to serve as escrow to protect both buyers and sellers on the platform. This is in addition to microloans and grants that can be electronically set to allow only pre-approved payments. The vision is to create an effective payment management system for these businesses. This will be delivered by Tingo, which already operates a mobile wallet, Tingo Pay, used by over nine million customers. One use case envisioned by Tingo is to facilitate a connection and communication between a wheat farmer, flour mill and baker, enabling them to easily discover each other, place orders, make payments, ensure the transaction, and complete logistics, all verified and guaranteed via the central clearing authority.