Rancard Solutions: Setting standards for African excellence
Ehizogie Binitie and Kofi Dadzie set themselves a challenge a little over 14 years ago: to create a software company that led the way for excellence in Africa.
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As Binitie puts it, they were conscious that Africans, as traditional recipients of international aid, “were not used to being givers and helpers — or providing services that are meaningful to the world at scale”.
The business partners, then in their early 20s, decided to buck that trend and create an organisation that connects brands to their customers around the world via mobile Internet platforms.
Inspired by the dot-com era, they founded Rancard Solutions Limited using capital raised from friends and family.
The odds were stacked against them. From the very beginning they were competing against the likes Oracle and Microsoft in the enterprise software business; and later with Ericsson, Huawei and other deep-pocketed vendors building software at the network infrastructure level.
Two years into the business, their initial capital run out. But they survived: by scaling down their team significantly and moving from fancy offices — at GCB Tower at Circle — to more modest accommodation. They narrowly avoided insolvency thanks to a strategic relationship that provided much needed cash flow to fund their operations.
Those difficult days are thankfully behind them, having attracted private equity financing from the likes of Intel Capital and Peninsula Capital (the same company that invested in Chinese internet phenomena Baidu).
Rancard now employs about 80 people — the majority of them are software engineers — and is the partner of choice in over 25 countries for the world’s leading tech and mobile phone businesses including Google, MTV, ESPN, BBC, Voice of America and Intel.
In 2011, Rancard was selected as one of the top 15 companies in the continent during the Africa Awards for Entrepreneurship — out of 3,300 candidates.
Rancard has survived and become so successful because of its obsession with excellence, reliability and a culture of innovation that you might characterise more with Silicon Valley than with Lagos and Accra (where the company operates from).
Rancard has been behind groundbreaking developments way ahead of its time. In 2001, they started doing what essentially Blackberry became – providing email services on mobile phones.
It was also one of the first companies in the world to provide “global airtime remittance” – the capability that allows you to buy mobile phone airtime in one country and send it to someone in another country. The firm was also one of the first to provide big data services and predictive analysis, where it built platforms to help businesses, including General Electric, predict problems before they happen by examining data.
Today, the company is looking at helping companies to determine which customers might be interested in products, services or information that they provide. With customers spread across multiple social and traditional media platforms, it is often difficult for businesses to determine the most effective manner to “meet” and communicate with customers who might be interested in particular products.
Take a typical telecommunications company running a particular promotion. Its customers and potential customers are likely to be spread across Facebook, YouTube, Google and Whatsapp - as well television, radio and mobile phones. How does such a company find the precise group of individuals who are interested in the promotion it is running?
Rancard’s software first aggregates data from customers across multiple social media platforms and mobile phones. Through algorithms it has developed, it is then able to analyse and interpret the data so as to be able to provide businesses with useful insights to find existing and potential customers.
Binitie and Dadzie obviously have a highly successful partnership, based on shared values and deep mutual respect. That partnership no doubt has played a massive role in the company’s success.
As Binitie (also the part-time pastor of Lighthouse Chapel) puts it: “It’s not easy to build things of any great value without a partnership. I have searched my Bible very hard and I have looked around for examples. And I am yet to find something of a meaningful size that has been built by just one individual. I think that I have been very blessed to have a great partnership with Kofi, my co-founder.”
The partners have no intention of slowing down anytime soon. As Dadzie puts it: “’Our aim is to merit a listing on highly-liquid global stock exchange - such as New York or London - with counterpart listings in other African exchanges, to reflect our African origin and heritage”.
“That will be the outcome of our ultimate goal, which is to become the mobile platform of choice of the world’s leading brands.”
Speaking to these two successful and ambitious business partners, seeing their passion and creativity, I am sure their IPO will be a big hit. In fact, I have already started saving to be one of the first to invest!
The writer is Chairman of Oxford & Beaumont Solicitors and author of Kuenyehia On Entrepreneurship, considered a groundbreaking resource on Ghanaian entrepreneurship. @elikemkuenyehia.
