Nigeria needs an escrow based payment system to truly bridge the trust gap in e-commerce and eliminate pay on delivery.

All these years and no one has built this. I believe the reason is that an escrow system involves not just processing payment but also adjudication operations. And considering the massive trust deficit and the low quality of products on the seller side, this adjudication operation is not trivial. It will also rely heavily on big data.

In 2014, we were going gangbusters. We were growing 20+% month on month. Lots of operational challenges but this one would be special. Then at 630am one day, I got a call from our head of fulfillment. The Nigeria Police has shut down the distribution centre. Details were murky. Day 1: I typically spent a few hours in the office before heading to the DC but on this day, I hurried straight there. What I found were over 100 warehouse workers that were chased out of the facility milling about along with a platoon of policemen.