In line with promoting Nigeria’s retail sector through technology, founders of tech startups, Alerzo Group, stakeholders and enthusiasts converged for several panel discussions, exhibitions, learning and networking at the Lagos Startup Week (LSW).
The six-day event which was held from July 25 to 30 in Victoria-Island, is the sixth edition and witnessed over 3000 attendees and 100 speakers.
One of the sessions on day four, which centred on ‘Future of Consumers and Consumers Trade (Payment, Retail and Trade)’ had Alerzo founder/group CEO, Adewale Opaleye; Paystack Startup Programs Lead, Nubi Kay; Klump CEO, Celestine Omin; TeamApt Business Lead, Temitayo Ajao and CEO of BUMPA, Kelvin Umechukwu as panel discussants.
Opaleye noted that the theme of the discussion was very important to talk about as there was a need to encourage retailers to move away from the old way of doing things to embracing technology.
He, alongside the panelists highlighted a number of gaps in the retail sector, which the imploring of technology, collaboration of different tech Startup founders and harnessing of their areas of expertise could help solve.
“At the end of the day we all need partners. We need to come together to achieve great things, we need to consolidate on what each of us has done really well and bring fantastic solutions,” Opaleye pointed out.
He stressed how it is necessary for retailers not to shy away from technology, while narrating Alerzo’s strides in solving the problems in the retail sector, as it owns over 400 vehicles which it uses in delivering fast moving goods (FCMG) to customers.
Also, how it has geo mapped areas of coverage and helped develop softwares to provide banking solutions to customers.
“Retailers need to move away from the old ways of doing business to embracing technology…To provide a solution to the problem of logistics we ended up doing something unthinkable by buying a fleet of vehicles and owning our warehouse.
“We also developed our software. We do deliveries within four hours of order because we own our entire vehicles. After sometime we noticed that a lot of our retailers go home with cash. So we ended up building bank solutions for our retailers,” stated Opaleye.
