Engineer wins $12,500 at Stanbic IBTC ideation session for techpreneurs, startups

Founder of Yochaa App, Osagie Zogie-Odigie, has carted away the sum $12,500 at the Stanbic IBTC Bank ideation session for techpreneurs and startups.

Zogie-Odigie, an engineer, who was among the three finalists where about 200 persons participated, would receive a workspace in the Stanbic IBTC Blue Lab, valued at $2500, and also be granted access to IT infrastructure for solution testing and development.

Speaking at the ceremony at the bank’s head office, the Chief Executive, Stanbic IBTC Bank Plc, Dr. Demola Sogunle, gave a brief background to the structure, focus areas of the financial organisation and the idea behind the ‘Stanbic IBTC Innovation Challenge.

He said the ideation workshop is to ensure development teams and startups clearly understood the purpose of the challenge and can submit applications that are fit for purpose, and aimed at specific problem-solving.

He said: “We believe that technology holds the key to addressing and enhancing some operational areas within our business that we are looking to improve upon, principal of which is making our card issuance and delivery system more seamless and cost efficient for the banking subsidiary.”

He added that the lender has taken innovation in the financial system to another level, by inviting external parties to participate and co-create solutions with the institution.

“We felt that we should go seriously into innovating some of our requirements by using an outsourcing company entities and third parties.

“We have gone through a series of ideation process, defined problems, and invited those who are playing in that space to come in.

“Having done the spinning programme, we ended up with three companies with three different solutions in some of the areas of improvement that we are looking for,” Sogunle said.

The winner, who expressed happiness, said the prize would be invested in building the project, saying the goal of the fund is to develop it to a point where it could be integrated with the Stanbic IBTC system to provide quality functions to their clients.

Giving an insight into the idea that led him to winning the quantum sum, elated Zogie-Odigie said: “The idea of creating the product is to come up with something simple and make it attractive for the millennial. I thought about Nigeria and the challenges, I found out the network challenges are poor, people don’t have data, so I had to work with something that compresses the data and make it light so you don’t need a lot of data for downloads.”