Call him a financial knight; you wouldn’t be faulted as Uzoma Dozie’s journey from traditional to digital banking has been seamless and successful. For five years, Dozie ran the show at Diamond Bank, one of Nigeria’s 23 commercial banks, before the merger with Access Bank Plc. Now, his newest venture is Sparkle, a digital bank which he likes to call “a lifestyle app.”
Indeed many were curious about why a man who had been at the helm of affairs of one of the biggest commercial banks in Nigeria would decide to set up a neobank which essentially is a startup at this point. But for Dozie whose passion for building the future of Nigerian information and data are enormous — hosted for many years an eclectic mix of Nigeria’s most exciting and driven technology entrepreneurs via his TechTurks TV Show— he believes strongly that rather than make many cash transactions, the future banker will make use of data. And true to his belief, Dozie’s influence is increasingly being felt in the digital financial and lifestyle ecosystem through Sparkle whose mix of providing banking services to individuals and businesses on a single platform is unique.
Since its launch in 2020, Dozie’s neobank has acquired over 40,000 customers on the individual banking side and 2,000 businesses. With a microfinance bank licence and a partnership with Visa to allow users to make in-person or digital payments with a Visa card, Dozie in April 2021 launched Sparkle Business to acquire a different set of underserved users —small and medium businesses. To consolidate on this gain, early this week, Dozie led his team to organise a webinar with the theme “SMEs as engineers of growth; Simplifying Support for Small Businesses”. At the webinar, he tapped some of the leading industry experts to proffer solutions on how to tackle common challenges facing SMEs in Nigeria. Panellists included Mr. Herbert Wigwe, CEO, Access Bank Plc; Karl Toriola, CEO, MTN Nigeria; Boye Olusanya, CEO, Flour Mills of Nigeria Group; Nneka Okekearu, Deputy Director, Enterprise Development Centre, Pan-Atlantic University; and Otto Abasi Williams, Senior Vice President, CEMEA at Visa. The webinar was moderated by Ms. Lehle Balde, Editor, BusinessDay Nigeria.
Dozie —born in England in 1969 and first out of five children— is obviously fast becoming his own man. The coming of age of Dozie, who looks even younger than his 53 years, can be gleaned from his determination to continue from where he left off at Diamond Bank and then expand the capabilities of Nigeria’s banking and retail sectors.