DreamOval: A Software Development House Focused on Tech-Based Innovations in Ghana

Interview with Henry Sampson, Co-Founder of DreamOval

What is your assessment of the sector in Ghana and in the African countries where you are present and where you are growing? Is it competitive? What are the latest trends?

Where we are playing as DreamOval currently is within what typically is called the fintech industry. We are also in the general enterprise software solutions delivery space. When we started eleven years ago, there was barely a sector and there were very few players. Most of the players within the sector were not building software. They were more or less picking software that had already been built and customizing it or implementing it for enterprises locally. When we came into the space, our focus was to build local capacity to build software locally. When we started, we were pace setters in terms of the mobile money space locally. Since then, we have seen a very large entrance into the fintech space. Today, it is very competitive. The government is about to pass a bill that regulates this sector, which shows that we have grown to the extent that there is government attention for it. The Bank of Ghana or the regulator, the government in this case, is the first on the continent to be putting in very proactive steps into regulating the sector. We see the way in which they are regulating as a potential for the development of the country, as well as a testament of the growth and competition. Today, there are over 76 fintech companies in this space in Ghana alone. What we have seen across Africa in some of the markets that we are now going to, is that there are much fewer players in the fintech sector. But, in Ghana, there has been a huge influx of new players, young people who also want to disrupt the sector. That has been interesting. But, there are about eight, no more than ten, key players within the sector and the competition is there. The competition is both from merchant acquiry to customer facing kind of competition. It is very healthy. Most of the companies in this are huge telcos, banks, and very innovative, smaller companies like us that are also trying to push the front. We have managed to distinguish ourselves in many ways in the enterprise sector, but there are many more players today. The biggest competition is that we do not just compete with software that was created by Ghanaians, although there are not that many, we are now more competitive with software that is coming from Nigeria and outside the continent from Oracle, Microsoft, and other players. For enterprise solution delivery, there was always a solution. When we entered, there was more local content within that space. It is still more foreign based, but it is very good.

What are the key solutions that you provide to the market? What are your competitive advantages?

Within the next six months, we will be ready to have a bigger investment coming in from anyone who may be interested or want an alliance with our vision and values, that is specifically around creating innovative software that involves human experiences.

When we started the business, the first flagship product was called iWallet. It was essentially an online payment solution. We were in school when the whole internet craze started. We saw what people were doing in terms of e-commerce and we wondered why that kind of disruption could not come locally. So, we created a product that would mimic the strengths of PayPal locally. That was back in 2006. In 2007, when we incorporated, we decided that we would use this product as our flagship. We have been working on this product for the past eleven years. We believe we have one of the most mature products on the market. We believe that e-commerce or digital commerce has the biggest advantage in leapfrogging us in our developments, especially in financial inclusion, in so many ways. With the evolution of payments, for the West, there was movement from cash to card and now to digital. We are leapfrogging the whole card revolution. Card has not caught on in Africa or in Ghana as much as mobile money and new digital payments. We have a huge focus on customer experience in terms of our differentiation. For every touchpoint or for every computer access the user has, they should be able to use our platform without any issues. We have our platform running from USSD to mobile to web, and we also have access integrations from other banking platforms into our application, which means that there are so many ways in which users can access us. We back our technology with the necessary integrations that makes it easy for our customers to do all the simple things they want to do in life. Today, I personally pay everything through the app very easily. I seldom visit a bank branch. I was trying to remember the last time I went to a branch earlier. Today, I visited a branch to essentially apply for something physical. In over two years, I have not applied for a checkbook because I did not need one. That is the value that we bring, especially to that space. For enterprise solutions, the advantage we bring from working with financial institutions for the past seven years is that we understand the kind of processes and pains that those institutions go through. We built a CRM for financial institutions for managing the life cycle of things that a customer would want to interact with and put more intelligence within that. So, in a number of ways, we can make you offer the service better by reminding you to do the right things at the right time. That makes our platform exceedingly more powerful, where we are not just expecting you to put in the right data, but once the data is in there, we have triggers all over the system that reminds those using our systems to do the right things towards the customer or to just have the right notification that allows them to serve the customer just a little better. With the way that the banking sector is so competitive locally, you need that differentiation in terms of customer service where the little things like anniversaries, or remembering to make a follow up, or making a call because you said you would are so important and we are making sure those kinds of things are done for our customers. As a company, from day one, we have been big on helping our community and everything that we do is to be able to help our community develop better so that in the future, even more people can access the things that we do. We are big on educating both those who are privileged and those who are not privileged on technology and using it to better their lives. That is a differentiation for us because we believe that it is more important that we prosper together as a community, rather than just for our business to prosper.

What do you do for the teachers and the female population through your Foundation?

DreamOval Foundation was set up very early on in our business and the focus was really to bridge the knowledge gap by putting in specific educational interventions where we thought they were needed. A key thing we have focused on is the creation, dissemination, and the utilization of knowledge. For the past eight years, we have been running a program called iTeach where every year, we gather teachers from deprived communities and we teach them how to use electronic tools and digital tools to better their teaching. One of the high points was when a Skype call came through from a teacher with his student in his class trying to teach them about communication. We did a video Skype call in our office which was very satisfying for us in the kind of intervention we are giving these teachers. Also, we trained over 200,000 children to code through a partnership we have with SAP and the Africa Code Week, which is a program they run locally on the continent. Different countries run the program and we run it for Ghana. In the first year, we trained 50,000 children, and another 50,000 in the second year. That has been phenomenal. FEMITY is the female fintech program that we have also started that equips ladies who want to enter technology with the requisite skills to do so. We have other programs we run like DOTTS, DreamOval Thoughts Transfer Series, sort of like a local TED that we created, which brings in people who have excelled in their field, no matter what the field is, to talk in depth about why they succeeded in their field and to understand what made them tick and to inspire young people and even us as a company in terms of doing and reaching to greatness. We have heard from one of the greatest boxing champions in Ghana, Azumah Nelson, through DOTTS.

Bill Gates’ Foundation, for example, has been around so long, but your Foundation is so young. It is amazing they have accomplished all that.

One of the things I always remember from Manchester University is when we would be told that we were a very privileged set of kids. It used to be annoying to keep hearing that because you try to work hard to deserve what you get. But, it was true in the sense that when you look at the continent and the number of people who were given access to the kind of education and information that we were getting, we were privileged. The biggest responsibility of having a privileged life is really to give. One of our beliefs is that when you are able to give when you are small, you give as well when you are big. If it is not in you to give when you are big, it is not a priority for you to give. But if you make it part of your DNA, if you have one small bowl of food to eat and someone is hungry, you share that, rather than waiting to have two and share the extra one. That shows more meaning. That has been our thought from the beginning.

The market in Ghana is extremely competitive. Is there something where you can differentiate yourself to external players that come here? Is there very strong competition with international players or is it more between national companies? Who are the big competitors for you?

For mobile money, the international players are not the biggest players in the game. The competition is very much local. For enterprise solutions, the international players have a big play. That is mainly because mostly foreign products were being used even before the local content started coming in, so local content has to compete with the legacy of the foreign products that have already been there.

How do you compete with that?

It is not easy to compete because for one, Oracle has a lot more developers than we can probably imagine now. Also, there is a thought that foreign software is better than local software. That is challenging. There are two sides of that coin. There is a side where there has been validation that local software is not doing that great and has issues. Some would say that every software gets its own issues. There is another side where you know that it is just because we see the foreign goods as more superior, where it is more a psyche kind of thing rather than feature comparison. We try to focus on a niche and not to compete on the whole scale. What can we be really great at? We focus on only that bit and we do not try to compete head on with Oracle, which is something we cannot do. We look at the things where we have better local understanding today, better perspective to build the right kind of things, and we execute there. As we get better there, we are given more responsibility to take on other new areas with these competitors.

You are not present only in Ghana. What about your international expansion?

Especially when it comes to mobile money and financial technology, in terms of other African countries, Ghana has taken a huge leap frog ahead of many other countries. Today, we are looking more in the southern region. We have begun our work in Zimbabwe already and by the close of the year, we expect to be live in Malawi. We also are having discussions on working with francophone countries. We have francophone partners that are working with us through that. We are very keen on having presence outside of Ghana, because today we have done a lot locally and we have seen that our services are needed in other African countries.

Are you interested in attracting partners or investors?

We have gone through different phases of our business. There was a time when we were crazy about investments. We thought investment was what we needed. Today, we are in a phase where we are restructuring forward, and we will need investments very soon. Within the next six months, we will be ready to have a bigger investment coming in from anyone who may be interested or want an alliance with our vision and values, that is specifically around creating innovative software that involves human experiences. The main focus would be that we create a strong partnership. We are not looking for savior investors. We are looking for investors that believe in the vision that we have set forth, in the kind of structures that we have put in place, and in the future of this business, to partner and to boost our effort forward and also for partners that help us to build our capacity in different ways. It is important that on a global market we are seen to be much more competitive and not just use local expertise for moving forward.

Are you looking for international partners in a specific field or area?

Today, our partners are SAP, Microsoft, and IBM, and soon, General Electric. Our focus today is SMART solutions and that is what we have pivoted our platforms around. Today, AI is big for us. We are looking mostly for partnerships around data and AI. We are doing a lot of things around computer vision as well that we believe should revolutionize the way in which a lot of things are done locally, and we are looking for partners there. Also, business excellence and operational excellence are huge for us because as you scale, these become pinpoints. People that understand the business of scaling and the operations of scaling are the kind of partner we are looking for.

Project yourself two to three years’ time into the medium term. What would the company be in two years’ time? What would you like to have achieved by that time if everything goes according to plan?

In three years’ time, specifically in terms of our five-year outlook that we currently have, we should be in ten African countries. By that time, we are expecting to be getting ready for an IPO. We are also expecting to have a substantial mix of our portfolio between both our financial solution and enterprise solution. Today, the state of our portfolio is more lop-sided towards enterprise because it took a while for the fintech sector to pick up. We are expecting that it will be more diversified and will have bigger market share. Today, in the fintech space, we are more solution providers as well, where we provide the necessary fintech tools for people who want to run mobile money solutions to start from the ground up without developing anything. We are pushing a more platform mentality around what we do as opposed to installing solutions. We see ourselves in three years as one of the biggest financial solutions platforms rather than products.

Do you have a final message?

In government, there is a lot of proactive work around making sure the technology companies are recognized today. That is excellent. We went on a trip with the Vice President earlier this year to Silicon Valley which was very good. The Vice President gave a lot of visibility to fintech companies especially. Today as well, we are going with the President on a trip, and that is good for business when we get to explore what is happening out there. The local content policy of government which gets enforced even for technology is bigger. We need to have a clear guide on that in terms of the amount of local content that has been pushed, but in terms of the implementation of that and making sure that we are deliberately forcing local content which now forces local companies to partner with foreign companies. The focus of that would be to have the necessary technology transfer and the capacity building that helps local companies have the requisite skills to build our country on the digital front. It is important that there is deliberate action with policy to say that we want this amount of local content. With the government being the biggest spender in the economy today, if the government goes in that direction, it will have a ripple effect in the private sector. Also, with the credibility of doing things in your own country, companies that are doing digital solutions can easily sell outside. Unlike more physical goods, digital solutions can easily be delivered outside the country like we are doing today. That has a huge potential in bringing in the needed exchange that this country needs to restabilize our currency and strengthen our economy.

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