Imagine being part of the earliest members of an organization hanging the narrative of commodities trade in Africa. That’s the thrilling journey that Nancy Olisakwe has embarked on for almost a decade. She joined AFEX as one of the first Xperts, starting as a System administrator and rising to the Vice president of Clearing and Settlement. Along the way, she has faced many obstacles and opportunities, but she never lost sight of her passion and professionalism. Every day, she strives to excel in her role and contribute to the success of AFEX.

Hey Nancy! Welcome, it’s a pleasure to have you here.

Thank you for having me.

We’d love to hear the story of how AFEX came to be. How did you experience the first steps of this amazing journey?

Interestingly, I was gisting with someone about our first days and jokingly mentioned there was no AFEX at the beginning; we did not have a physical office and operated out of the lobby of Transcorp for about a week.

On some other days, we had to work from the basement of another entity which doubled as a partner company, but as time went on, we got a space and went into full gear. Another important detail is that we didn’t start as a trading entity even though we were pursuing to be licensed as one. The journey has been very interesting. We started with 3 warehouses, but today we have over 130 warehouses, not just mini warehouses; these are very well-equipped large, capacity warehouses in Nigeria, Uganda, and Kenya.

We started off with just 3 staff, a few field officers, and right now, we have close to 2000 staff strength; on the other hand, we had just a few clients who trusted us, about 2 or 3 clients, but right now we can say everyone wants and is willing to go into business with AFEX.

That’s incredible! How did AFEX manage to keep the business going with just 3 people on board?

At that point, we couldn’t say we were spinning the wand, but it was a truckload of heavy work and hard work. It was rough; I remember us jotting down every instruction Deji gave about transactions while manually processing payments. It was an intensive paper-driven process between Lagos and Abuja; we had to send instructions to Lagos to effect payment because we didn’t have a finance team on ground in Abuja.

In the early stage, we tried different waves of technology that didn’t go in our favor; however, this birthed the need for us to develop our own software that would be tailored to our needs. This led us to build WorkBench and every other app we have today.

How did you land this opportunity to join the company at such an early stage?

Prior to coming here, I had a background in call center operations. A friend mentioned that an organization in Abuja needed the skillset, and the person had to be proficient at speaking Hausa. I gave it a shot, started the process, and after 3-4 interviews, I was invited for an induction. The induction was exciting because it had Tony Elumelu in attendance. My happiness was a bit dented when I discovered we were starting something new with no solidified structure.

You have such an inspiring story, and I’m sure it has led to many amazing outcomes. In your decade-long journey with the organization, what are some of the highlights that you have witnessed or been part of?

The biggest for me is the culture shift; I’ve seen a transformation from a rigid to a flexible structure. When we started, this culture didn’t exist. This is one of the lovely things about growth; you get to discard things that don’t work and embrace the ones that promote productivity.

In the beginning, we were focused on resumption time and dressing style. Staff was focused on maintaining these rules rather than focusing on how to get better at their roles, after feedback, we had to repurpose and focus on deliverables rather than the other factors that make the workspace tense and unproductive.

The second would be technological growth as I mentioned earlier, everything was previously paper-driven, and when we started using 3rd party innovations, we met roadblocks because they didn’t fit. Now, we have technological innovations tailored to our needs, i.e., if I need to do reviews or analysis, I don't have to be in the building, unlike the server we had before, where you couldn’t leave the office until you were done with your analysis. We have WorkBench, ComX, the Logistics app, and a host of others now.

What was your first position in the company? How did you begin your career here?

I think many people can relate to this twist; I was supposed to resume as a call center manager, and voila! It was a system administrator role. Whenever anyone came to me because they had system glitches, I’d remind them I knew nothing about tech.

After that, it changed to the Trading Manager, and now it’s Vice President, Clearing and Settlement. I’ve transitioned and done multi-level roles- HR, Outreach, Event planning, and Office administration. Now, I am both VP, Clearing and Settlement, and Market Controller.

I’m curious about how the growth of the company into other markets has affected your team. Have you had to adapt your strategy or approach? How has this impacted your role and responsibilities?

Technology has influenced me positively here. A safe landing from the menace of manually induced stress. Before we had to upload transactions into the banking software manually, then the next day, we would check the statement to see if it was successful and then manually upload it into the software again. The process encompasses from the WorkBench to banking platforms and then back to the WorkBench manually which alone led to a lot of errors of omission, commission, and all other sorts.

Now we’ve created a system that will allow an automatic flow of transactions instead of manual invoicing automation because of the large volumes we’re trading. The new WorkBench and ComX app has been unique in solving the issues we had.

What is an important lesson you have learned from your work at AFEX?

Think big!

What does thinking big mean to you?

As I mentioned, we started on a very small scale, but we had a vision that we would build a Pan-African exchange that would support commodities across Africa.

In fact, a global exchange would support commodities trading; although the journey or how we were going to achieve this was unknown, we kept the dream big. there were instances where challenges didn't allow us to go through with the part of the strategy we had planned, but we focused on the goal.

What is the most unforgettable moment that you have shared with your fellow Xperts?

It’s really hard to choose one when you’ve experienced a lot, but I can't forget in a hurry when I had my babies, the whole community came out for me I felt loved and appreciated for the first time. The support had me crying.