How e-auctions are reshaping Nigeria’s market — Nwaukor, Lagos CIAN boss

Hillary Nwaukor is the Chairman of the Certified Institute of Auctioneers in Nigeria, CIAN, Lagos chapter and Chief Auctioneer at I-Naira Integrated Resources Limited, otherwise trading as I-naira.com, a foremost e-auction platform in the country. In this interview, the alumnus of the University of East London, United Kingdom, says Nigeria’s e-auction market holds immense potential, yet remains largely untapped, presenting a significant opportunity for growth and innovation in the country’s digital economy. He speaks on how the Institute is helping the government in sanitizing the practice, emphasising that with the right framework, e-auction industry could become a game-changer, creating a more transparent, efficient, and competitive marketplace that benefits both sellers and buyers. Excerpt of the interview with our Correspondence 

How did you become involved in the auction industry?

My interest in the auction business was ignited during my MBA program at the University of East London. In the course of my study, I noticed that I was able to buy books that I needed for my studies on eBay for far less than the current market value for brand-new books. For instance, some books were being sold for £100 if you are seeking to buy them as brand new but when you go on eBay, you see students who may have used the same book and now are getting rid of it at £5 or £10. So that is where the idea started and I said to myself that when I’m done with my MBA, it’s something that I should activate.

So when I was done with my program in early 2009, I gained employment with Nexon Business Services, a management consulting firm. There, I met my initial co-founders, one is unfortunately late, and we put our heads together and started working on this project as a side project. After a year and a half, I left Nexon to set up a consulting firm that would later lead me to work for the NNPC as a consultant. So while working at the NNPC, we worked on the I-Naira project. We kept working on it and nurturing it until when I knew the system was stable enough to go live and we went live in 2016.

How does the I-naira.com platform work? 

I-naira.com is the foremost e-auction platform in Nigeria. We pioneered e-auction in Nigeria in 2016. Here is how I-naira.com works. We act as a middleman for clients who need things to be sold and are looking for the most transparent way to dispose of them. The next question is, how do we achieve this most transparently? Which is where our business comes in. As a middleman who will give full accounts of what we’ve been giving to sold, when a client gives us items, we first of all, carry out the current position assessment of those assets to ascertain if what they have given us on paper is the same as what we found on the ground and based on that, we will now do a recommendation. If they, for instance, tell us that the net book value for a particular item is maybe N10, based on our assessment, we will tell them that we can get them more or less of that N10. So, the clients and our team will arrive at a minimum reserve price that they’re seeking to get for a given item. We will now publish in national dailies that this entity is selling so, so and so items on I-naira.com on a particular day so that the public will be aware of the scheduled auction.

The standard practice is to give the public at least a one-week notice. And so, from the day the publication is made, either in national dailies, online, or any form of public notice, the auction will be held at least a week after. When that happens, we’ll now go live on auction day. To keep our platform clean and simple and not attract everybody on the internet, we have a sign-up fee and this sign-up fee has nothing to do with any of our clients. It’s just to make sure that, for example, if you want to bid for a car worth N10 million, you should be able to pay N10,000 to show interest. Every member of our platform must pay that sign-up fee. On the auction day, people will compete till the time designated for the particular auction elapses. Our system is a timed auction. It starts at a specific time and closes at a specific time. Let’s say, an auction is scheduled between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., the system will shut down and will not take any more bids immediately it’s 4 p.m. Again, if you participated in the process and you feel that you’ve been cheated, we have what we call bid history. The bid history is actually captured in milliseconds. So we capture the process in this manner to entrench transparency, probity, and accountability. Over time, you wouldn’t see anybody have any disputes having gone through the bid history. So when that process is concluded, the next process is for the winner to proceed and pay within a specified period. We usually do 48 hours for the winner and when that winner fails to pay, the system will move to the runner-up who will have 24 hours to pay. So before we hit from the fifth to the tenth person, we will have someone willing to pay above the reserved price. 

How do you ensure the authenticity and quality of items listed on your platform?

As I mentioned earlier, when a mandate is received, after we have signed a contract, we go for assessment. And sometimes when required by the client, we will value the assets and then recommend the assets and tell the customers exactly the state of the items. If it’s a car, for example, we will state what is working and what’s not working. This will guide the buyers to make an informed decision. That is how we carry on the business of auction online and over time, build trust with over 25,000 users on our platform. Most of what we do is entirely based on trust and it comes from both the seller and the buyer. We have built a very transparent brand over time that when people hear I-naira.com is putting up a bottle of water for auction, they don’t doubt the quality. 

So how do you get paid? 

It’s commission-based. Our commission ranges from 3 to 10% depending on the type of items we are selling. And for the cost of managing our platform, the buyer pays us a certain percentage too. So as the middleman, it’s just like a real estate person, you get paid from both sides. So we are salespeople using auctions as a tool. The interesting thing about auction being a form of sales is that it’s not just the act of doing business, for you to be able to practice auctioneering, you must have a certain level of integrity. You see this thing we’re doing, the buyer has their record on our platform. The seller, which is our client, has their backend login on our platform and we have our backend login as well. So everybody sees what’s going on. That way, we are checkmating ourselves because as human beings, the only thing that keeps us in line is guiding principles that we all have to follow otherwise, it will be a chaotic kind of society. 

What advantage do e-auctions have over traditional physical auctions? 

The benefits are overwhelming. When you’re running an e-auction, you have a pervasive reach to more people who potentially take the chance to win the item you’re trying to sell, unlike when you’re conducting traditional live auctions. I’m sure you remember two years ago, the last traditional live auction conducted by the EFCC, and how chaotic it was, which explains why the commission says the resources required to manage such a crowd are enormous. Secondly, they need to monitor what is going on through this process that I just explained to you, which is members of the commission or a client of ours, will sit in the comfort of their home or his office and see exactly what’s going on, in real-time. So e-auction reduces the cost to both the seller and the buyer. The buyer sits in the comfort of his office or home without transporting themselves to a physical location and bids with the excitement of bidding. And now because people are competing and there is no form of collaboration among those competing, the seller, which is my client, will tend to gain more in terms of the amount of money people are going to bid for the item. E-auctions leave audit trails as well. For instance, our clients can always come back to ask for the record of the last sales we did for them and all we need to do is go to our system, download their sales history and send it to them.

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