Blockchain technology continues to shape our everyday life, especially in the world of finance as it keeps on providing options for individuals and organizations on how to optimize the advent of digital money.
One of the ways blockchain has been leveraged is the aspect of cryptocurrency, a technology that is redefining the world’s financial system through decentralization, while ensuring borderless payment.
Taking it to a whole new level, there are many platforms that offer cryptocurrency and digital asset exchange, however, there are specific services that are uniquely offered to make some of these platforms stand out from others.
Think of a platform that allows you to trade and convert Bitcoin, gift cards, airtime to cash.
Botmecash a cryptocurrency and digital exchange platform is ensuring that users can do all the aforementioned securely, easily and real quick.
On Botmecash you will be able to create and have a wallet address to purchase and sell Bitcoin, and other Altcoin.
In a chat with Oluwasegun Kosemani, Founder of Botmecash, blockbuild.africa learnt how Botmecash is leveraging blockchain technology to redefine how users can make digital asset transactions securely and privately anytime across the world.
How did your journey into technology and eventually blockchain begin?
I am a realist, go-getter, and I refuse to be a product of my environment. As a creative addict, I have always been that technocrat.
In my secondary school days, I was in the science department, but my attitude was more entertaining and creative because the scientific environment in Nigeria is not what it is supposed to be so you really can’t discover who should be a scientist or a techie. I also remember playing football and I was also very good at music.
I’ve always been around the government. I was the Tech Lead and Special Assistant on Media to the office of the House Committee Chairman on Infrastructure for Lagos state house of assembly from 2008 to 2010.
At that time, we did a lot of community and human capacity development from the get-go. I engaged in a lot of public-private partnership ideas, where we are always committed to the community, youth organizations, bringing projects that can foster prosperity and liberation from poverty.
It was fascinating how I found myself at the helms of affairs at Nigeze TV in 2012. I Just wanted to be a TV presenter and with my background in the media, I got to feature many celebrities in Nigeria’s entertainment industry on exclusive interviews with 2Face, Wizkid, Davido, MI, Tiwa Savage, Olamide and so on.
Owing to my work ethic, I quickly rose through the ranks and in six months, I was made a Brand Executive of the company where I rolled in significant amount of revenue, though the pay wasn’t that good, I got a whole lot of massive exposure.
By 2014 and I wanted something more different, I needed something to push out my creativity. I’ve always been an advocate for the digitization of broadcast media and I already knew that digitization was coming to the industry.
I have had exclusive engagements which had me broke a couple of stories in Nigeria’s entertainment industry, a result that has made me push a whole lot of original digital content.
I’ve always wanted to do something unique, I wanted a breakthrough or do something a large number of people can benefit from.
So, I found myself working in government again, I became a Teach Lead and Communication Strategist to political party arrangement, The Job Creation Board a Public-Private Partnership which was headed by Nigeria’s former Vice-president, Namadi Sambo and Tony Elumelu from the private sector.
It was a job creation initiative, and at that time with the Office of the Special Assistant to the President on Job Creation. We had a partnership with UK DFID and Nigeria Stability and Reconciliation Programme (NSRP) where I got a certification in Conflict Sensitivity and Reconciliation in Kaduna during the heat of the state crisis.
So I have always been working around the Presidency via one of the Special Assistants who is now with us as the HR (Josephine Washima) to help change our human capacity development.
I acquired some knowledge about how things work in HR and we went ahead to build a tech solution, called the National Jobs Exchange, the official jobs portal of the Federal Republic of Nigeria under former President, Goodluck Jonathan.
I also remember that I wanted to study Computer Science, however, I ended up studying Chemistry at the University of Lagos. While I was in school, I was exposed to a lot and I realized I needed to build solutions that a lot of Nigerians can benefit from. I realized that the only way I can do that is to build it myself.
In one of my trips to the United States in 2016, I was few days in the New York Code and Design Academy’s Kickstarter class and I knew I was going to create a solution for Africa.
I could easily send money to Nigeria and other parts of the world, however, that wasn’t the same story for my other Nigerian fellows who found it difficult sending money over especially to high risks countries.
So those people around me back then trusted me to help them send money anywhere in the world. It appeared I had turned from my mission in the US to a walking bank.
This was a big challenge and I had to be back in Nigeria to develop a solution that would solve this challenge. I had a colleague back then who had a working relationship with the United Bank of Africa, we had worked with a production arm of the bank.
As of then, UBA was in over 16 countries, but not fully operational in the US so we got a deal with them to build a fintech application for it that would allow easy money transfer beyond borders.
I had learned so much working with large organizations in building the diaspora banking application for UBA and at the end of the day, we had a successful outing. If we could do something big for UBA in the diaspora, then we could do it here in Nigeria and this was a motivation for me.
Moving forward, we had done multiple projects with different agencies, one of them was with the Nigeria Diaspora Commission.
We built an AI chatbot called ‘Abike, Abike Dabiri is the special adviser to the President on diaspora affairs.
During the highest point of the pandemic, we were trying to get an IMT international money transfer operator license which cost was 2 Billion Naira, and it required that you show evidence of owing such assets.
Fortunately, it was at that point that Bitcoin began gaining popularity and since the cost mentioned earlier wasn’t affordable, I decided to leverage blockchain technology and so we built Botmecash.
We were just about three, Raphael Okunola, and Goodness Akinyemi, two young interns from Osun state, and I. Both of them easily walked through the fintech domestic landscape, moving through the ranks to making a great impact on the platform.
Today we have a 10 to 12 man strong team, however many of them 95% of them are working from home. Botmecash has over 5000 users on its platform, and this indicates the level of trust people have in us, beyond the platform, people trust the technology behind Botmecash.
Botmecash is here today to solve the challenges people are experiencing with the current financial systems, people are looking for a platform they can trust, a platform that won’t charge them unnecessarily like the banks while ensuring faster movement of money worldwide.
Therefore Botmecash is enabling people to make transactions securely and privately. We have high-level individuals doing cross-border remittance for shipments and it’s really interesting, we’re just a year and a few weeks old, but this is just the beginning.
With what we have done, we can grow very fast, so that’s just my transition from multiple backgrounds to blockchain technology.
How Botmecash works
We don’t ask for too much, just visit our website, www.botmecash.com, the ‘bot’ stands for technology, the ‘me’ represents you and I, while the ‘cash’ stands for transactions. The bot was derived from ConVrs’ah, one of our AI software built for NIDCOM, so we wanted to put this together in perspective for people to really see the value we have brought through technology.
We are automating technology for people to do transactions, so intending users can sign up with their username and password, and once that is done, you will get a confirmatory message that will then prompt you to create a Botmecash transaction pin for authentication. All of these take 30-35 seconds maximum to get onboarded the platform.
You can then go ahead to complete your profile. Botmecash doesn’t require a lot of Naira around it, just a make a one time deposit, so you make a cash deposit and it gets converted to Bitcoin, you can move the bitcoin to another person’s Naira account while you can also move your Bitcoin to any account anywhere in the world.
So we are we’re working with an Over the counter system, or should I call it manual p2p whereby Bitcoin is converted directly to cash.
For instance, if I am here in Nigeria, I can move $1000 worth of bitcoin to the Bank of America account, and the deposit is made in 24 hours.
What typically happens at our backend is that we use OTC and p2p operations to ensure the deposit are made quickly. We have had transactions made through to China and even as far as Australia.
People from all walks of life are using this service, Omotola Jolade, Lateef Adedimeji, Starboy Terry, Lucy of BBN and many others
Before now, you can basically do almost everything you do with your bank on Botmecash cash. However, the government before issuing a ban on FIs, MFBs and PSSP didn’t do their research well.
If they had, they would have realized that Botmecash was generating tax payment for them because people were paying LIRS and FIRS taxes on Botmecash converted to cash.
A lot more is coming that Botmecash is set to offer. P2P is the bedrock of money and value exchange without any third party and that’s what we have built in our system, so we are trying to enhance it with a lightning network.
When you see Botmecash, we want you to think of an alternative bank, we have built infrastructure for banks, so how much more is how we are going to leverage blockchain for Botmecash.
As an exchange platform does Botmecash deal in other digital assets?
Right now we deal with Bitcoin only, that’s because we don’t want to be speculative. You know that Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency built on blockchain and is like the future reserve currency of the world.
So if you look at the growth trajectory, you can see that almost 95% of people that have held Bitcoin for more than two and half years have made a significant profit.
So we don’t want a situation whereby we start to sell speculative assets. But now we’re really observing what is going on in the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem and we’re seeing what other values can be added to Botmecash.
Botmecash is looking at adding Ethereum, probably XRP, Litecoin and Solana, Dogecoin maybe. We are basically looking at what the market wants and see how we can provide that particular service. In addition, it is also very important that we sell Bantu’s XBN because of the relationship we have with them.
What makes Botmecash different from other African exchange platforms?
Firstly, we have empathy for people, we make sure that our customer service is top-notch. Not that we don’t have issues, but we try to address them as quickly as possible.
I personally sometimes call customers to apologize to them as most of the challenges experienced are liquidity issues and this is one of the reasons we are calling on the government to really pay attention to us in the way they support banks.
Imagine somebody wants to send $5000 worth of Bitcoin in the middle of the night, with a thorough KYC done on such user, the deal is done in a matter of minutes, however, for a large sum of money to be processed, we need the support of the government and secured relationships with commercial banks.
What we see is empathy, because we understand how humans operate, we are people running technology and not the other way round, so we try to handle users’ money in ways that bring satisfaction.
Secondly, the service that we are innovating is P2P and it is scarce as just a few people have that service, and we are launching that platform soon. The fact that you get your cash quickly or buy bitcoin on our platform as quickly as possible while moving it instantly to anybody across the world is worthwhile.
Also if you have to move the bitcoin to someone who wants cash, Botmecash offers you such service. As long as the account details are credible and verifiable, you can move Bitcoin to any bank in the world through Botmecash and note that the receiver will get your bitcoin in cash.
Our system automatically converts your bitcoin to cash and deposits it into the receiver’s account.
Another way that makes us stand out is the type of HNI we have on our platform for confirmation of trust. As mentioned earlier we have somebody with us who has worked at the highest level with the presidency, so this suggests the type of credibility we are attracting to Botmecash.
As you also know there are a lot of scams in this crypto industry, so Botmecash doesn’t sell on WhatsApp and Facebook, but rather through our website, over the counter or through peer-to-peer
Botmecash allows you to receive cash payments from Bitcoin anytime and anywhere in the world. You don’t need a third party, even the bank doesn’t have to be a part of the transaction.
We are also looking at setting up Bitcoin ATMs in Lagos and all over the 6 geo-political zones in Nigeria while adding Botmecash crypto cards that can be used anywhere all over the world.
There are also plans to speed up our relationship with the mobile money operators so you can make your payments with Bitcoin. Even the street hawkers through Botmecash can get paid via Bitcoin.
What’s your take on financial literacy for kids?
Hyper-cryptonization is what we advocate, so we are already teaching kids how digital money operates. The transition we have experienced in the growth of technology has been massive, so we are moving from the old era to the age of digital money.
I have been privileged to train bank executives as I am self-taught when it comes to the world of finance, so I am giving back knowledge. Training kids for me is a passion, therefore we would be taking this training to schools and religious centers.
We are also not excluding the adults as we have a program called Bitcoin hot spot, where we discuss the decentralization of bitcoin and network events.
At Botmecash we really encourage a financial literacy session for kids in both cryptocurrency and digital money to prepare them for the future.
“Fiat to Crypto Banking” Cryptocurrency exchange, digital assets holdings and exchange, cross-border remittance with crytpo, bills payment, DeFi Education and many more decentralized finance features. Botmecash is taking Fintech to the next level.
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