Boosting Government Revenue Without Raising Taxes. How African Governments Can Finance New Projects Through Governance Technology With Prakash Sabunani

[00:00:00] You're listening to the Unlocking Africa podcast. Welcome to the Unlocking Africa podcast, where we find inspirational people who are doing inspirational things to unlock Africa's economic potential. Today we have Prakash Sabunani, who is Senior Vice President and Partner at NSOFT,

[00:01:15] a company that uses its advanced solutions to generate extra government revenues without raising taxes. Welcome to the podcast, Prakash. How are you? Thank you, Terser. Very well. Glad to be here with you. Thank you for having me on.

[00:01:33] It's a pleasure to have you on the podcast. As always, I like to start from the beginning. So before we get started, introduce yourself and tell us about Prakash. Absolutely, Terser. So basically, you know my name, Prakash Sabunani. I'm a Senior Vice

[00:01:52] President in the company. NSOFT is a GovTech company. We were founded in 1986, and this company has started its IT Ventures. It's basically an IT company. It was founded for IVR solutions at the inception. And from IVR solutions, it evolved into telecommunication

[00:02:12] solutions, and then to telecom regulation solutions to help increase transparency and visibility in the telecommunication sector. And it then escalated and scaled up to GovTech company. So that is where we are today. And we have been in business since 1986, covering

[00:02:35] diverse markets within the IT sector because as you know today, everything is based on IT. And IP and IT are very, very closely linked. So we took the curve at the right time,

[00:02:46] and that's where we are today. Fantastic. So you've given us an overview of NSOFT and its transition within different areas of the tech space. So maybe if we can go a few steps back,

[00:03:00] and you can give us a bit of an idea with regards to what was the story behind the founding of NSOFT? So that's a good question. And NSOFT was actually built to answer the need of the evolving nature

[00:03:16] of technology within the IT sector. The founders were actually software engineers, basically, and they understood very early in time that more and more devices and more and more technologies need to be connected to be able to render fast services and very efficient services to

[00:03:38] different businesses and different consumers. So that's where we started with the IVR sector, covering the banking industry, so B2B, B2C. And later on, of course, this evolved into specific sectors like the telecommunication sector, the finance industry, and building into

[00:03:57] security software as well. So as we know, everywhere we have there's a security risk, there's always security breach. And NSOFT was able to cover that through IT and started supplying billing solutions, security solutions to MNOs, MNOs being mobile network operators.

[00:04:17] And with that, there was sort of an organic transition from one side of services which were being provisioned for an entry level to a very high-tech requirement to cover security aspects and to cover, of course, revenue assurance. And that's where the revenue assurance is where we

[00:04:37] actually focused on and included more and more services creating a very high diversification for different industries within the B2B sector and now the B2G sector. And that's how NSOFT transformed from a technology and intelligent technology

[00:04:54] enterprise into a Gulf-tech enterprise. Fantastic. So you detailed that NSOFT was founded to address the needs of the ever-evolving nature of technology. So what would you say is the current vision and mission of NSOFT? The current vision of NSOFT is today to answer,

[00:05:16] of course, the need of the governments because that's who we work with today. The need of governments to creating more transparency within their revenue space. Today, the clients of NSOFT, our main focal point are today the revenue authorities and the finance ministries within

[00:05:38] specific governments in different geographies to help them optimize their revenue and focusing more on the digital sector. The digital sector has become very a maze of different services and different aspects of revenue streams which governments find very hard to track

[00:06:06] and to capitalize on. So they, of course, work on older methods which are declarative methods which today don't really work. And with that, they're seeing a decline which would sort of translate into an erosion of actual revenue that should be coming to them. So with this,

[00:06:26] they need partners who are digital savvy and who bring them digitalization into their work environment to make them more efficient, more impactful and of course, more risk adverse how to mitigate their risk within the space. This is very important because they

[00:06:46] need to work with economic contributors who are part of their ecosystem. It's very important. And to make them understand that they need to bring more transparency in the transactions which are going on within that same ecosystem. And thereby, there is a lot of public coercion

[00:07:04] that goes on into this methodology. And we come in not only as a technological partner, but we also advise on the right approach and the right method to bridge the gap between the formal and the informal market mainly in the IT sector and the digital segment.

[00:07:22] So you're addressing the needs of governments with a focus on emerging markets. I guess you're doing a lot of work within Africa. Correct. Was this always part of the company's vision or mission or did it develop at a later stage in the journey?

[00:07:40] That's a good question. The company was initially focused on mobile operators, IVR solutions. We used to cater to public pay phones, we used to cater to different prepaid products in the telecom stream into so many different areas of products which were always

[00:07:59] in demand and of course, always scaling up to new requirements from the customer base that you know, we naturally this of course brought us to what the biggest consumers of the prepaid products in the telecom business or in different segments of the industry.

[00:08:15] And that brought us to analyzing different geographies around us. So you have of course the matured markets which are the Western economies in Europe, in the US and different parts of the world, but everything is basically interlinked.

[00:08:33] So it came to answering the requirements of different customers in different geographies and where we really saw an impact was in the emerging markets. So the emerging markets would be of course Africa, Asia, Latin America and these are the

[00:08:49] markets that we work on and that we work with primarily not but not only. We also address countries in the Middle East, countries in Eastern Europe and some other geographies that we're actually building on today. But primarily our build up base, I'll build up

[00:09:12] clients that really took us from one stage of our evolution to another more where basically in the emerging markets. So yeah, Africa has been a very strong strong dominance playground for us and that's where we of course gain a lot of experience

[00:09:32] and of course we're able to display our product range and evolve with our clients. That was very important because this is a partnership. So the more the clients have a requirement and the more you learn how to scale up your product line and try to be at the

[00:09:49] mark of their expectations in providing solutions that really could answer their needs. And that's exactly how we build the solution line that we have, knowing that we are the only single source provider today who are able to garner such a vast range of solutions to

[00:10:07] answer different needs within the digital space because this is all about the digitalization of governments and of their economies. So if we can look closer at the solutions, I know we've mentioned endsoft's mission is to help government increase their revenue without raising

[00:10:25] taxes. So how do your solutions help governments increase their revenues without raising taxes? Simply by covering the existing legislation that they have in place. They have tax policies in place which are always in tandem with the expectation of the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD countries,

[00:10:46] OECD regulations. All of these are always on the prime focus line of these governments and they work with such institutions because these are institutions that participate in the growth of their economies. And we do not want to disrupt what they have currently in terms of tax policies

[00:11:07] and tax legislation. So what we do is that we work with them in keeping what they have. There's no requirement to increase their the current tax base and we just optimize because there's a lot of optimization that needs to be done and that starts with transparency.

[00:11:24] And obviously that's where we work with these governments in helping them cover different sectors of the digital space that they don't even have a clue about and don't even know how they could begin by attracting those revenues which are totally new to them and

[00:11:44] with a total ratio of erosion, which is very high. So that's where we try to bridge the gap and that's where they know there's an informal economy that's far larger than the

[00:11:56] formal economy. And our role is to show them the way to bridge the gap between the formal and the informal sector within the digital space. This is all about digitalization and the more there's going to be digitalization, the more the governments are going to find it difficult

[00:12:13] to just rely on the old systems that they use for ensuring accurate revenue. And for that, they need digital tools. And one of the missions that they get back from the IMF and World Bank and such financial institutions is to digitalize themselves and use digital tools which are

[00:12:35] made available to them and that they need to put the emphasis on how to capture more of the revenue that needs to come back to them. And that's where there is no need for but tax increment, there's a need for transparency, transparency increment. That's what's important

[00:12:56] not tax increment. Tax has already been put in place. There's a tax policy there they have been voted. The legislation is in place. We work with what they already have on the ground. That sounds great. Can you provide an example of a country where ENTOS solutions have

[00:13:14] significantly increased government revenue? Absolutely, we have quite a few examples in such a space, one being the DRC for instance. So we have the DRC, we have Sierra Leone, Offlate, we just started providing our services over there. In the DRC, it's a very clear

[00:13:34] example, we started with one segment of the digital economy which was mobile money. As you know, the mobile money today is of course one of the intrinsic parts of services provided by telco operators. Today, telco operators don't generate so much of their revenue through voice

[00:13:51] services. Voice services was the prime product that telco companies were actually providing from inception, from times immemorial but that has changed and it's evolved. Voice services have really become redundant for them where they really have an edge today is in data provisioning

[00:14:08] and of course financial services. Don't forget we work in markets where the bankarization rate remains still very low. In these emerging economies, a lot of people do not believe in working with classic financial institutions as we know them and they rather have their money

[00:14:25] closer to them rather than putting them into bank accounts. So they use their mobile operators as their financial institutions. So they take their money which we call fiat money to the mobile operators and convert those into digital payment means by through digital wallets

[00:14:46] and that's where you have the advent of mobile money which today generates the larger part of the turnover of these operators and obviously this is something which is very hard to track for the governments because mobile money goes through different circuits, it's different clearinghouses,

[00:15:03] payment gateways and what have you that handle all these transactions and it is very difficult for tax based authority to really understand how this technology works and what they need to put in place to track and trace all these transactions. Therefore we come into play and

[00:15:20] this is what happened in the DRC to come back to our topic. Yes. When we moved in there, they had several providers who are giving them the service that we could actually bring forward

[00:15:33] and when we got really into the the nitty gritty of the of the matter, we realized that they had an erosion of close to 60 percent of what was currently being declared and being collected despite having two or three providers for the same service and therefore within the first

[00:15:52] year we were able to give them back 60 percent incremental value on their current tax collection on their on the current baseline. So with that they realized you know how much they had to

[00:16:04] recover just from one segment of their digital economy and how much more was left to be done and from one service we went on to another and every every year we discuss a new service with that.

[00:16:17] So the good thing with us is that our solutions are totally modular. A government doesn't have to take all the full range of services that we provide, they take what they feel is the primary

[00:16:28] need that they have and the priority that they need to address and we work with that and if they're satisfied then we can discuss other avenues and other segments of the market based on what are their requirements. So this is one example that we had and then

[00:16:42] another example would be Sierra Leone when we started with Sierra Leone, we detected an erosion rate of 140 percent in the first few weeks of implementation within the telecom industry. It's huge. When you look at those numbers and when you put them into figures, when you

[00:17:00] look at the ratio and you put them into into figures it's really mind-boggling and if you compare the tax to GDP ratio of these countries, you then understand why there's such a big gap from what you see in the day-to-day economy to what actually the tax authority

[00:17:17] is able to collect and this is why they're always looking for funding when they don't really need so much funding. They have enough within their home ground base that they need to collect but they should know how to detect it and how to collect it.

[00:17:30] It's one thing to show them that there is so much revenue that's being eroded but it's another thing to also help them find the right methodology to collect it and to bring it back into their coffers and that's where NSWF does a full-base service.

[00:17:47] So you mentioned that your service is not about changing or disrupting government policy, it's about implementing the right technology solutions for optimization and also that these solutions are modular. So how do these solutions integrate with

[00:18:05] existing government systems? That's a very good question. We basically do not ask our clients, our prospective clients to change what they already have. What we do is that we ensure that what they're currently using is really giving them the anticipated results and meeting

[00:18:23] their expectations because a lot of service providers will come with a base of services that they're actually going to provide and end up giving them very controversial, I would say, result. It's not really what has been expected and the government doesn't even know if what

[00:18:41] they're actually getting as figures and numbers is really accurate or not. So they need to have systems in place that cross-check what is being actually rendered as a service within their own departments and what we do is that we first understand when we come into a client's environment,

[00:19:00] we first understand what's the infrastructure that they have currently. We run a quick audit to understand what they're actually using and how we can interface and integrate those systems within our technology. So we don't ask them to change anything. We just cross-check what is being

[00:19:18] done and if they are up to the mark and that service that is already being provided is doing the job, then we don't have much to do and we just confirm to them that yes, you have something

[00:19:31] that works pretty well and we don't have much of a complimentary service to provide. But in most cases we do realize that there is always something that needs to be added on or there's something that

[00:19:46] needs to be improved on. So this is where it is a choice that the client has to make and the fact that he's actually considering bringing us in is because he does realize that something is not matching their expectation and despite having many service providers, many vendors,

[00:20:05] not all the vendors are able to really meet up on their promises. And this is where the client has a lot of gaps and needs to reinforce his current technology and product range to become more

[00:20:24] efficient because of course, technology is always evolving on both ends. So whether it's on the customer end as well as on the provider end, you need to have something that goes along, mobile operators and gambling operators, pay TV operators, online services, more and more services

[00:20:43] are being provided in the digital space. And do they really have the technology that goes with it and the technology which they acquired a couple of years ago? Is it up to the mark of matching

[00:20:59] services which are being provided today? That's the question to be asked. You don't get regular updates, the technology is no longer up to the mark. Technology is something that lives. If you

[00:21:10] don't keep it up and if you don't work on it, it will get obsolete. It's like even software. I mean, you write software, I mean, today within a span of two, three years that software has

[00:21:20] gone obsolete, you need to update it. So that's exactly what it is. You have to follow up on technology and make sure that what you acquire as a technology base to control and to monitor

[00:21:33] what you're actually getting back from the revenue base is that far with the services which are being provided by the operators and by your economic tissue in the country. That's very important. So once I guess you've had those conversations and you're ready to

[00:21:53] work with the clients to governments, how do you get the buying from say African governments for them to give you this level of access to extremely confidential and sensitive information?

[00:22:08] And that's a very good point. The thing with us is that we do not, for that matter, work on the on a service which is externalized. Our service that totally internal to the client space, we keep all the data which is being collected is centralized and unified within

[00:22:34] data center that we build and create within the space of the customer. We do not export the data. We do not work on the cloud. That's very important to know. We only work on site.

[00:22:46] So all the data that is being collected, that is being analyzed is stored on site within a data center provided by the client that is actually controlled by them and where we have an access

[00:22:59] which is under their supervision. So we ensure that all the data stays within their environment and doesn't filter out or is not being exported. And they understand that because we build the systems with them and with their team. The one thing that we ask our clients when we

[00:23:18] move in is that they need to provide us with a project manager and a technological manager who then follow us through the whole deployment process up to the implementation and totally understand what we do and how we do it. So it's a total transparent implementation process

[00:23:40] from start to end. So the client understands what's being done. They know how to do it because we train them and we also do skill transfer competencies. So that's very important. And therefore there is no leakage. We don't leak any of the data because we don't store it

[00:23:57] in our systems. It is stored within the client systems. Interesting. So you've detailed how the data is stored and the specific measures that you take to protect sensitive data. As this process is highly technology led, how do you overcome

[00:24:16] resistance or maybe reluctance from governments to adopt new technologies? Well, that is something that is part of the modis operandi, if I may say. I mean, governments always have a way of pushing back on such technology because there has to be a

[00:24:35] willingness for transparency and transparency is not something which is always very welcomed in most departments of government bureaucracy. So that's something that we need to work with. And the governments have understand that it makes sense to have some sort of visibility

[00:24:57] and some segments of the industry do not bring them any revenue at all. So then they have to find a way to optimize on those areas where they are generating very low to practically

[00:25:10] no revenue. And in doing that, they bring us into a Pandora's box because when we start looking at one aspect of a segment in the digital sector, we quickly understand that it is linked to another

[00:25:25] one and to a third and to your fourth. So it streamlines into many different sectors of the digital economy because at the end of the day, they're all interlinked. And I'll give you

[00:25:37] an example. For instance, when we start looking into the gambling activity in a country and we start analyzing what is the revenue that should be declared within the formal and informal sector

[00:25:51] of the segment of the industry, we realize that a lot of these payments which are being made to the gambling operators by consumers is through the mobile wallets. So of course, mobile money becomes a big part of the gambling activity as we can well imagine where payments

[00:26:09] are coming from and financial services. So one thing leads to another and then we understand that there's a lot of data provisioning that's been going on in the sector and the financial services have also contributed to the gambling sector. And then a lot of things that were

[00:26:29] not detected maybe in a sector which we are not primarily monitoring come up and that becomes an activity which we call the whistleblower activity. And then we bring it to the notice of the authority, the revenue authority that look there we have flagged some irregularities in

[00:26:47] this sector of the economy which we're actually not supposed to be looking at but it's linked to the sector that we're actually working on. And it needs to be flagged and then one

[00:26:57] thing leads to another. So governments of course understand that by giving us a lot of pushback, it does underline something which if they're not I would say very efficient in the way they're actually optimizing their revenue and yet they are proving to be difficult in adopting new

[00:27:16] technologies to improve on their current revenue level and their current efficiency levels is that there is something which is of course needs to be addressed. And that's why we don't talk to just one to one person or to one authority. We talk to a global panel of government

[00:27:36] officials who understand what we actually bring to the table and they have to decide whether they want to create transparency within their different department levels and different revenue generating organizations or they want to keep it under wraps. That's something that

[00:27:52] they have to know. And this is where today more and more governments have that willingness for transparency because they want to improve on their revenue and they want to do better for

[00:28:02] themselves and for society on a whole. I mean they want to bring in more revenue so they can also contribute to the improvement of their local economy and of their people. So there is that willingness. Brilliant, thank you for sharing that, Prakash. So outside of say the reluctance

[00:28:19] from governments to adopt new technologies, what would you say are some of the biggest challenges and soft faces when working within emerging markets? That's something which is very controversial because every economy has their own current challenges and we are faced with economies that

[00:28:40] either already have systems in place and that are already think that they already have a good cover on services that we provide and feel that if they bring us in, they will be confronted with

[00:28:53] other challenges which they don't want to get into. So what is really very challenging for us is actually creating a disruption in a comfort zone for revenue authority that thinks or that feels that they are already well covered with the current technology that they have adopted

[00:29:10] and only to realize that if they actually come in with us, it's going to create a lot more disruption than they can actually handle. And that becomes one of the biggest challenges is to make them

[00:29:20] understand that we are not coming to just sell them a solution, effectively we're not selling a solution and this is where it's very important to underline this. We are not selling them anything. We are coming there to work with them as a partner and to show them,

[00:29:35] to give them visibility on what is the true picture of the revenue that they should be collecting from their local ecosystem and which is not maybe being done to the level that's being expected.

[00:29:50] And that's where we help them understand this from a prime position and put in front of them the challenge of the desirability of wanting transparency and to what level. Don't forget where there's no transparency, there are clusters of departments which have

[00:30:09] a certain comfort level with their economic contributors and when transparency is created that sort of gets disrupted. So it's a catch 21. Do you want transparency and do you want to disrupt a certain comfort level or do you want to just reshuffle the whole ecosystem of your

[00:30:28] revenue system to make it more efficient? It works in so many different economical spaces. It's not only in the revenue assurance of governments, it works also in big corporations. After a certain while big corporation get very settled in their ways and they sort of think

[00:30:46] that they're being very efficient until there's a total reshuffle and everything is moved around and then they realize how much more efficient they could have been. So this is the usual question is how efficient does the government want to be in their revenue collection?

[00:30:59] So I guess for governments that welcome that type of disruption, what advice would you give to governments in the major markets looking to improve their revenue generation? Well the advice to give them is to make their systems more transparent so that even the

[00:31:19] economic contributors know that they have to be at par with the current legislation which is in place with the governments because if they do not then you know they will be tracked and it

[00:31:30] will be identified. They need to show and they need to be very clear on what are the expectations and in the compliance and the policies which are actually being provided to the economic contributors in their space, they need to be very transparent that you have to comply with

[00:31:49] what you are signing up for. If not we will know and we will be able to come back to you with proof that you are not complying with what you actually committed to. So it's very important that you

[00:32:02] know they understand this because economic contributors are very often companies that are actually based overseas which have overseas headquarters and they use a service that they bring to a country for various reasons and therefore there has to be transparency and

[00:32:21] there has to be efficiency that comes in and that's why we have economic regulators for such service providers that come in mainly when it has to do with the population, when it has to do with the B2C consumer market in a country they need to be under

[00:32:40] certain supervision and they have to be regulated and these regulators need to be supervised by the revenue authority. So that's why there is a chain of control, there's a chain of command that comes from the finance ministries in most countries

[00:32:55] that need to be respected and when they have, when they are digitalized, when these governments are digitalized and have digital tools that enable them transparency everybody meets up and comes and is up to the mark of meeting their expectation. So that really helps

[00:33:12] government. Thank you for that. So if we move from governments back to endsoft, what are the long-term financial stability benefits that endsoft provides to emerging markets? We basically enable emerging markets to set a threshold on what should be their revenue

[00:33:33] collection in different segments of the digital economy and that's what makes it very interesting because with us they understand the reality of the potential of one or the other of their digital economies and how they can best capitalize on those. You'd be surprised to know that a lot

[00:33:51] of governments do not even know what one or the other of their regulators is able to collect from their segment of the economy until they actually call for a common contribution towards a common cause or towards a specific requirement from the government. Then only do they realize

[00:34:10] that these specific regulators were able to contribute to such a high amount that they didn't even understand or didn't even have a clue that there was so much that was being actually generated by them. Therefore, this goes to prove that a lot of governments do not

[00:34:25] speak to each other, do not interact with each other and in not doing that they have no visibility on what are the collections from one regulator to another. When they work with us all this becomes

[00:34:39] common knowledge because we have to unify all the information in one central database and that is provided to the revenue authority in a console where they can see everything within a glance and therefore every part of their economy becomes transparent to them.

[00:35:00] And this is where a lot of the regulators today are still kept in the dark by not knowing what is going on with one regulator or another because information doesn't always flow within their own ecosystem. Interesting. So if we look specifically in terms of the

[00:35:18] long-term financial stability benefits, if we look at the metrics, what metrics or indicators do you use to track the effectiveness of your implementation? That's a good point. We actually of course buy our experience and buy our knowledge of

[00:35:36] different economies, different segments of the digital space. We understand the numbers of contributors. So this is economic contributors within a country and the number of clients and subscribers that they actually target to move into that country. We use a lot of economic cues,

[00:35:57] we use a lot of economic data factors we gather from the public and the private domain to then understand that how we could contribute better to an economy by bringing our solutions. I'll give an example. For instance, in a country where you have maybe 12 million inhabitants,

[00:36:16] a population of 12 million people and you have certainly five or six mobile operators, that sort of rings a bell. It's something which is not very common, which doesn't make a good economic sense. Five operators, five mobile operators to just speak about the mobile

[00:36:33] operators are trying to compete in the market of only 12 million people or less. That means something is not making good business sense and then we come in and we try to make sense of it all. And advise the regulator through of course the economic bodies

[00:36:52] of the revenue authority or the Ministry of Finance, how best to optimize on this segment of the business whereby they have a very large contribution from their economic players, economic contributors with a very small market base. And so how did they go about that?

[00:37:12] These are a lot of cues that we actually come up with and that we analyze and compare and bring up that data to our clients to make them understand how best to optimize. So then

[00:37:24] either they have to do consolidation or either they have to bring in more players, make it a more competitive space or reduce it because it doesn't make sense. So there's always a situation that you have to analyze the existing environment with the one that needs to be

[00:37:41] brought in for more improvement. And this is where we use all our experience and all our database which has been collected over the years in analyzing what is the best way for them to optimize on their different segments of the digital space and how many contributors they

[00:38:00] need to bring in one segment or the other and what are the policies that they need to bring in to implement risk mitigation if that makes sense to you? Yes, it does. It makes perfect sense.

[00:38:10] I guess during this conversation we've talked at length in terms of how your work shapes the way that governments optimize revenue collection. So if you look away from a different perspective in terms of how do you see future technology shaping the work that you do at Ensoft?

[00:38:30] Well, technology for us is part of our DNA. We work with technology all the time and we find new ways of improving our technology. We cannot rest on our laurels. We have to keep improving

[00:38:41] our technology to match the ecosystem of our clients, so to speak because some of our clients of course are not as advanced as another. Each client has got a very specific area that they need to manage and sometimes technology can be also challenged. So therefore we have to

[00:38:59] adopt our technology and that's where Ensoft has got a lot of strength because we build our own technology, we customize it and we manage our own technology. We don't work with third parties. That helps us in terms of efficiency, in terms of durability and in terms of better

[00:39:17] provisioning for our customers and their future needs. So technology is something that evolves and we actually build on our technology all the time. We are improving it, we customize it, we come up with new features and functions based on of course our experiences. As I said,

[00:39:36] Ensoft uses whatever they gather from other clients and other markets and we make all our clients benefit from that experience. So we actually distribute our experience and our knowledge across the board and we improve on it all the time. That's why when we move in with

[00:39:55] our technology, we provide updates on our software on a regular basis. We monitor all the risks, all the vulnerabilities of our clients and we make sure that we reinforce those. So there's no, we try to make sure that even on the cybersecurity side, we are absolutely safe,

[00:40:20] the controls are in place. On terms of efficiency and revenue stream, we make sure that we are optimal to the best of our knowledge and if something is actually not very clear to us,

[00:40:35] then we dig further and create better systems to cross check on what we are actually providing our clients. So we ensure that we get the best results for our clients because you should,

[00:40:49] the one thing that you have to underline here is that our performance is based on what we are able to actually generate for our clients. So don't forget that we do not sell anything to our

[00:41:01] clients, we are partnered with our clients. So we actually have a revenue share model that if we perform, we are able to benefit from the performance. But if we do not perform,

[00:41:11] we have no benefit at all. So it is totally in our interest to keep ourselves in check and make sure that our performance is by all times optimal. So if we look past future technology and look at the future of Africa,

[00:41:26] where do you see Africa say in five years time with regards to the use of technology to enable governments to be a lot more efficient, effective or economical in the way that they operate?

[00:41:41] Well, Africa is really a big main of opportunity. Africa has a lot of opportunity, provides a lot of services and Africa is a growing market. It's a growing population. Africa is more than

[00:41:57] a billion people today and is going to grow far larger than so many other economies. If you look at the EU, if you look at the Americas, there's a lot of saturation. The growth is very impeded.

[00:42:14] It's not growing as fast as it should be. Africa is growing much quicker, much faster, simply because they have a very young population. They are hungry for new technology, they want new services and the middle class is growing. So with that, there is more requirement for

[00:42:31] services and better governance. So obviously today there is a stream of a new generation coming in, a generation which is educated, which understands how things are done in the matured markets and they want to emulate that in their countries. So you would have noticed that

[00:42:52] there's a counter-migration effect today of people going back to their source country, to the countries of origin. And they go abroad to study and they come back to the countries to become strong economic contributors within their own nation. And in doing that, they of course

[00:43:12] bring in new services, they bring a lot of knowledge into the country and they create a lot of opportunity. And therefore, I think Africa is really something which is known to

[00:43:26] a lot of technological partners and a lot of these big tech companies who have their focus on Africa because they know that that's where they need to capture the next advent of growth surge.

[00:43:43] There's going to be such a growth surge in Africa in the next five to 10 years that that's where they need to be positioned. So clearly Africa has a lot to offer and has a lot of

[00:43:54] potential for all technologies compounded and that's where we need to be positioned today. So therefore, I think governments understand that, international institutions understand that and they're helping in building a better Africa for tomorrow.

[00:44:11] Fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. So if we look closer to home, where do you see NSoft in the next five to 10 years and how do you envision your long-term impact on the economies of

[00:44:25] emerging markets? Well, NSoft is actually growing organically. We of course have our base in Africa but as I told you earlier in our conversation that today we are also expanding to other regional geographies out of Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is of course covered, North Africa is

[00:44:48] another area that we are actually working on and of course we're now going on to the Latin American countries. We want to explore further out of the African geography because we want our experience to benefit other markets and of course we also want to grow in those markets.

[00:45:05] So the world is a very big place and we have a lot of areas that we can actually come in and you're contributing. And I think that's for us, one of our objectives is to grow as a company of

[00:45:16] course to create more opportunities for ourselves and for our own ecosystem within our appliance space, within our own company and collaborators who work with us and also our partners. We work with a lot of partners who have a lot of good technologies to bring

[00:45:33] in and we help advise them also on how we could grow together. So for us it's a whole ecosystem that we actually take care of and that we garner for the betterment of our clients,

[00:45:47] of their space, of their economies and of the population. And at the end of the day it's all about people. We want people to benefit from what should be theirs and what

[00:45:57] should be coming back to them and not create dependency. And the problem that we see is that by the fact that our governments do not know or do not have that willingness or desirability to create

[00:46:10] more transparency through technology, what happens is that they tend to depend more on financial institutions to back them up when actually they have it all within their doorstep. So we try to help these governments reduce dependency on international financial institutions

[00:46:29] and become more self-reliant. And for us that has become a mission, how to help emerging economies and new markets be more self-reliant and creating their own resources. I think that to us is an

[00:46:44] ambition, has become a challenge and is a very satisfactory process when we're able to actually see that it's actually giving us the results that we had anticipated. Quote of the week. As people we often have quotes, mantras, proverbs or affirmations that

[00:47:00] keep us going when times are challenging or when times are good. Do you have one that you can share with us today? I would just say this, don't do to someone what you wouldn't do to yourself.

[00:47:17] And for us that is very important. We don't want to mislead our clients and we don't believe in giving them false hope because our reputation is what counts for us the most. And if we mislead

[00:47:29] our clients, we're misleading ourselves. So we believe in transparency, we believe in honesty and we believe in a willingness for progress. So we do not give false hope to our clients and we don't give them something that we wouldn't want to face the repercussions of ourselves.

[00:47:48] So our reputation and our trustworthiness is essential. So for us it's all about trust, it's all about building and being constructed with our clients. Fantastic. Thank you for sharing that brilliant way to end today's conversation.

[00:48:04] Prakash, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast and thank you for sharing how Ensoft is shaping the financial landscapes within the emerging market. So yeah, it's great hearing all about the solutions and the implementation. So thank you for your time.

[00:48:22] Thank you, sir. It's been a pleasure. And look forward to seeing or hearing about how things progress at Ensoft. Perfect. And I'd like to keep in touch with you and look forward to your next podcast. And if there's anything we can do to contribute in improving

[00:48:40] your technology, let us know. We'd be happy to work with you. Oh, I'd love that. We'll definitely keep in touch and we will speak soon. Absolutely, sir. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you to everyone who has listened and stayed tuned to the podcast.

[00:48:56] If you've enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share or tell a friend about it. You can also rate review us in Apple Podcast or wherever you download your podcast. Thank you and see you next week for the Unlocking Africa podcast.