Uzoma Dozie is a known name in the Nigerian Financial world. He served as the CEO of Diamond Bank, one of the 23 commercial banks in Nigeria, for five years before the merger with Access Bank.
Before his appointment as CEO of Diamond Bank, Uzoma Dozie served in various positions in the financial institution for 18 years. A transparent and customer-centric man, Uzoma’s venture, Sparkle, is a digital bank described as “a lifestyle app.” He believes strongly that rather than make many cash transactions, the future banker will make use of data.The guru of digital banking, Uzoma is the first son in a family with five boys. Born in England in 1969, his voyage in life has taken him through many countries, but then, staying back to invest in his fatherland, Nigeria gives him more pleasure. Son of an entrepreneurial expert, it is safe to say investment is a family thing for the Dozies.
In 1971 his father, Pascal Dozie, founded the African Development Consulting Group (ADCG), his consulting company. Sparkle is a Nigerian digital platform that has been providing financial, lifestyle and business support services to Nigerians around the world. The digital platform was founded by the former CEO of Diamond Bank, Uzoma Dozie in August 2019, but was launched in June 2020. Sparkle has competed favourably with other fintech platforms in Nigeria like PiggyVest, Kuda among others. Interestingly, the seemingly new platform has held up against these already established players in a short while, as it closed a seed round of $3.1 million to scale operations in October, 2021. The bank is in partnership with companies like Network International and PwC Nigeria.
Sparkle offers an array of services from flexible payments and savings to analytics via its Android and iOS mobile application. Sparkle secured a banking license from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to offer financial services. Quite aware of the customer-service failure associated with digital platforms, the Sparkle app has an inbuilt bot called Indy. Indy is a chatbot that provides all the information a customer may want in real-time. This has largely taken care of customer service issues.It also joined Open Banking Nigeria, an initiative created as non-partisan and non-financial API standards for Nigerian financial services. Asides this, Sparkle has secured partnerships with payments giant, VISA; tech multinational, Microsoft; and auditing and accounting giant, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).According to Dozie, the partnerships will provide expertise in APIs, cloud computing, data science, machine learning, tax and financial advisory services for the company.Sparkle’s mission is to help Nigerians fulfil their potential and to simplify Finance and lifestyle of its teeming customers, leveraging on technology and data.
The new Fintech company is leading a new generation of digital only businesses licensed by the Central Bank of Nigeria.As the CEO of Diamond Bank, Dozie began making moves into the tech scene since 2015. But from being an angel investor to hosting his online TV show, Tech Turks and pioneering tech event, TechFest, Sparkle seems to be Dozie’s main play to make a name for himself in Nigeria’s tech space.After Dozie left the commercial bank after its merger with Access Bank, he announced the establishment of Sparkle, a project that had been in the product development stage for almost a year.Sparkle is a fintech service that allows users to track daily, weekly, and monthly spending patterns, with detailed breakdown by category. One of its features, Sparkle Stash, is PiggyVest-esque as it lets users save towards specific goals.Dozie described Sparkle as a lifestyle and financial platform which is evident in its other features. Users can make purchases online and in-person with both Sparkle physical and virtual cards. They can also make split payments, make utilities and bill payments, and there’s SparklePay which lets users send money to people without knowing their account numbers.Since its launch last year, the neobank has acquired over 40,000 customers on the individual banking side and 2,000 businesses. Similar to most digital banks in the country, Sparkle has a microfinance bank license. It also has a partnership with Visa to allow users to make in-person or digital payments with a Visa card.
Olamide Adeniji is a member of the editorial team of TheScript Newspaper
