A young problem solver, Tolu Oluyemi, the co-founder of Pay1One, a leading digital revenue assurance platform owned by Avancee Pinnacle, in this Q&A reflects on the journey toward solving Nigeria’s plethora of palavers one tech solution at a time.
Tolu Oluyemi, a graduate of Business Information Technology from the prestigious London SouthBank University in the United Kingdom and a former product manager at SystemSpecs (Remita) was driven to set up payment solutions for the public health sector while facilitating the adoption of the Treasury Single Account (TSA) of government health facilities on the Remita platform. This gave rise to Pay1One.
Tolu and his Co-Founders, Peter Arijiniwa and Adedamola Bowale, saw a lacuna in the payment system in public health facilities.
The revenue collection apparatus of these health institutions from primary to tertiary was plagued with corruption, inconsistency, besetting bottlenecks, ineffectiveness and leakage. This makes both patients and health institutions not to get the best out of the system.
The London Trained tech leader said Avancee Pinnacle has recently also partnered with GetPayed Technology Limited, to pilot four hospitals each in Ekiti and Ebonyi.
[Excerpt]:
As Nigeria’s first fully-digital Payment Platform for healthcare institutions, Pay1One has processed over 10 Million Dollars in revenue for public hospitals in Nigeria in 3 years. That’s a great effort. Kindly tell us more about this feat
In our bid to deal with corruption, and leakages, and maximize returns for public health institutions, from Tertiary to Primary health care centers, Pay1One was created. It is important I emphasis on this because that is the vision behind the innovation. This Payment platform automates revenue collection in health facilities, with a minimal cost.
Pay1One, which was first deployed to just one health facility when we started out in 2019, has now enjoyed the patronage of 100+ Tertiary and State hospitals, Federal Medical Centers, Primary Health Centers, General Hospitals and Federal MDAs in the country.
We launched in 2019 at one location (health facility), the location actually had an existing company they were using, but their solution wasn’t good enough and was quite expensive. However, we brought a fully digital solution, less expensive and automated. This was how we were able to penetrate the market.
With Just one health facility and about 4 staff, today we exist in over 100 hospitals and medical centres, with 170+ staff strength.
Pay1One, which has processed over five billion Naira (N5 billion) of transactions, and deployed to major federal and state health facilities, was bootstrapped without external investment or press limelight. We are more focused on solving the problem than making a fuss about the problem we solve.
How did the Startup achieve this growth?
We experienced the big break in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when we onboarded two major model hospitals in Nigeria, the Federal Medical Center Ebute- Meta and the Federal Medical Center Abeokuta.
In FMC Ebute- Meta, there was also an existing platform for revenue collection but let me quote the Chief Medical Director of FMC Ebute-Metta, Dr Dada, who said when we activated his facility on Pay1One, their revenue ‘tripled by 100%’ This is due to our optimized fully digital system and the efficiency of our team.
Even the state government we partnered with to ensure revenue assurance in its Primary Health Care Centers, experienced 500% revenue growth, making it possible for the state to employ more medical personnel and for these centers to fund themselves. This is the kind of real-life problems our team is solving and impact we’re trying to make.
We being able to process $10 Million for these hospitals within 3 years is incredibly huge, if we were actually not there maybe these health facilities will only get 30% of this revenue accounted for because of massive leakages in the system.
What is the future of Avancee Pinnacle and its payment solution?
Well, we are looking to venture into agency banking by leveraging our existing structure in remote and rural communities due to our service delivery to health facilities in such areas, thereby encouraging financial inclusion for the unbanked.
This will be another game-changer.
Kudos Bro, the sky is no limit. Good thinking.