Peter Atuma Powering Payment Solutions 

After leaving a senior role in the UK to pursue entrepreneurship in Nigeria, Peter Atuma now chairs several companies, including Princeps Credit Systems Limited and Tango Brook Technologies. He tells Vanessa Obioha about his entrepreneurial journey, business philosophy and the technological solutions he believes can strengthen financial security in Nigeria

“Just give me two minutes,” Peter Atuma pleads as he walks into his office in the Ikeja-Alausa business district of Lagos. Usually punctual, he has been held up by an impromptu meeting on this cloudy morning. Dressed in a blue business suit, he looks every bit the leader he has grown into. His neatly trimmed hair is flecked with grey at the sides, his strides purposeful and his composure commanding.

True to his word, two minutes later, I am ushered into his spacious office, furnished with minimalist, understated elegance. Even the open shelves are uncluttered, displaying only a handful of awards. His preference for space, I discover, is not a recent development. It dates back to childhood, but it also offers a glimpse into how his mind works.

“I really prefer to have a bit of space so I can think properly,” he explains. “That’s why we have people whose minds are good grounds for big thoughts. They like to clear rubbish or noisy thoughts out of their minds. You would hear people talk about signals versus noise. When you let the noise crowd your mind, you can’t really have the space to get productive thoughts out. So we like to clear that rubbish out of the way.”

As he speaks, the impression of a man driven by purpose becomes more apparent. Atuma’s career spans more than 30 years in finance and IT. He began at Nigerian Industrial Development Bank (NIDB) Trustees Ltd., where he worked from 1992 to 1998, before moving on to roles at prominent UK-based firms, including Morgan Stanley, EC Harris (now Arcadis), and Telecity Group (later acquired by Equinix). From 2013 to 2020, he served as Global Head of Information Security Governance at Equinix Inc., overseeing teams across the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

But after years of working in the UK, he eventually decided to take a different path. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he resigned from Equinix and returned to Nigeria to pursue entrepreneurship. The decision marked a new chapter in a career that had equipped him with considerable experience in finance, technology and organisational leadership.

Equinix, he says, was particularly influential in shaping his understanding of organisational culture, lessons he would later carry into his own businesses.

“I was so into the culture there that I knew that I couldn’t let it go. Even when I started my business, I still carried a lot of those cultures into my businesses, and I see the same kind of result in terms of the progress that I saw in Equinix.”

Among the principles he carried with him were assuming positive intent in colleagues, bringing positive energy to the workplace, and encouraging employees to speak up and take initiative. He believes these practices foster innovation and inclusion, allowing people to contribute meaningfully to an organisation’s growth.

At the first anniversary of Tango Brook Technologies, the energy technology and intelligence company he chairs, Atuma spoke about how an idea he conceived more than 30 years ago had finally become a reality. The problem was familiar to individuals and businesses that buy fuel: inconsistencies in fuel receipts and the difficulty of maintaining reliable records of purchases across filling stations.

The idea first occurred to him in 1992, during his National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) year. At the time, he had no clear way of turning it into a workable solution. Today, the Tango Fuel app offers a way to address the problem, bringing an old ambition within reach. Seeing the idea take shape still moves him.

“At the time, I didn’t know how it was going to come to fruition because of the vast limitations. Technology and connectivity were not really as we have them today. In fact, we didn’t even have cards for payments three decades ago, so it was just difficult to deal with the problem. And I thought, how could companies just live on continually with problems?”

The question captures a central tenet of Atuma’s approach to life and business. He is not one to accept problems or shortcomings as inevitable. He prefers to identify them and find ways to address them. In the case of Tango Brook, the solution took decades to materialise, but the delay did not diminish his resolve.

Nor does he believe that Nigeria’s pace of innovation is necessarily slow. On the contrary, he sees considerable ingenuity among Nigerians and believes that solutions are possible, even when the conditions for developing them are not yet in place.

“One may say that certain solutions may require certain kinds of ecosystems to be aligned, or some connectivity or infrastructure to be in place, but then you keep your eyes open for those moments. And sometimes what we do is drive the introduction of those ecosystems, or infrastructure, or whatever it is in the ecosystem that will make that happen, to either contribute personally or at least be aware when they are coming up, so that you can take advantage of those environments to create solutions. I don’t think that we should put up with the thought that solutions will come from some planet, some other planet,” he says.

For Atuma, the ability to develop homegrown solutions is no longer an aspiration. It is already happening. The Tango platform, he notes, was built by Nigerians in Nigeria. He also sees opportunities for the business to expand beyond the country.

The Nigeria Atuma grew up in has changed considerably over the past three decades. During his early career, automated teller machines, payment cards and mobile devices capable of facilitating digital transactions were not part of everyday financial life. Technology has since transformed how people access money and conduct business, but some fundamental challenges remain.

One is identity verification, an area in which he believes the financial system still has significant gaps.

“We still have a lot of people who don’t have BVN, for example,” he says. “Millions of people in Nigeria still don’t have BVN. What that just means is that they are excluded from access to funds.”

Another concern is the authorisation of financial transactions, particularly when large sums are involved. Atuma points to the continued reliance by some banks on scanned signatures as a potential vulnerability.

“For example, in Nigeria today, you have this crazy situation where most of the banks will have a specimen of a signature for executives, and then they accept as authorisation, a lot of times, scanned signatures. If you have a fraudulent executive assistant, for example, who has access to your electronic signature and has studied your behaviour, knowing how you attach these things, maybe it is the executive who actually attaches those signatures to letters that can move huge sums of money. They just append the electronic signature to the document, and a lot of times the bank honours it, even till today.

“Some will say they go the extra mile of making a phone call to that executive. Hey, we’re in the days of AI. Your voice can also be cloned. There are clever ways of doing these things. We have to start to think differently.”

To address this vulnerability, Atuma says he has a patented biometric digital signature solution in Nigeria. The technology, he explains, would enable an executive to authenticate a signature through biometrics rather than relying on a scanned image, regardless of their location.

“No matter where the executive is in the world, rather than accepting some scanned signature as a signature, you can then have a live signature on the back of the biometrics of the executive such that wherever he is in the world, it splashes out a particular signature in a way that can be verified that it’s from his biometrics.”

The solution is already in use at Princeps Credit Systems Limited, a consumer lending company he chairs. Atuma says the company has disbursed more than N25 billion this year, attributing its high collection rates to three core principles: seamless identity verification, affordability checks and salary-source collections through the Workers Aggregated Credit Scheme (WACS) and Deduct.

For all his enthusiasm for technological innovation, however, Atuma does not believe that progress should come at the expense of the human relationships that once defined business.

Having started his career in banking, he remembers a time when customer relationships were built on a deeper understanding of people’s needs and businesses. Bankers, he says, often took the time to understand how their customers operated and offered support beyond individual transactions.

“Back then, the bankers got to know the customers more intimately. They had relationships where the bankers took time out to understand the businesses of their customers and help them. Today, it’s about transactions more than anything else. We don’t even know the business that they are in and how they do their business as much as we used to do back then. So sometimes we miss those fundamentals in today’s world, and I think that technology shouldn’t replace those fundamentals, but strengthen them.”

It is a principle that extends to how he builds and manages his own businesses. Atuma believes that people remain the most important ingredient in entrepreneurial success.

“There are certain elements that are combined to produce success in business. You have the people, process, technology, and product. A combination of all of these would produce success, but I always like to start with people. Without the people, your process would be useless,” he says with a laugh.

For Atuma, entrepreneurship is all about people and possibilities, and a willingness to learn from failure.

“Failures can be avoided. Once you know the art of success, you can avoid failures,” he concludes.