"It is not about looking for a job. It is about deciding how you want to live. And this will help you set your core values." Jerry Ejikeme, Cranfield MBA, on his philosophy of life.
On Thursday, 24 November 2022, we were delighted to welcome to the Cranfield campus Jerry Ejikeme as our closing speaker in this autumn's Guest Speaker series. Jerry Is a hugely successful entrepreneur who has built a telecoms business rooted in the UK, USA & Africa (physical operations in 12 African countries) that today turns over $75 million every month and processes in excess of 2 million transactions a day globally. He has an extraordinary story of pioneering a market more or less from scratch, serving the populations of sub-Saharan Africa and migrant populations around the world. Jerry himself has gone from treading the streets of Peckham, south London, selling top-up cards, to sitting at the top table with some of the world's major telecommunications players.
Born in Nigeria, Jerry grew up in the UK but did a degree in his home country, where he qualified as a barrister. Subsequently, he worked for a UK MVNO powered by BT and that is when his big break happened. His employer declined an opportunity to sell mobile phone top-up payments to expatriate Nigerians in Britain for use by their friends and families in the vast rural hinterland back home. The Nigerian diaspora numbers many millions. Jerry seized his chance and, in 2007, left employment to start Sochitel, taking with him a fellow BT employee.
There followed years of constant travelling as he built the business. Within three years, Sochitel had become a market leader in selling top ups to the African diaspora and was on its way to becoming a true technology business. The key, Jerry realised, was digitisation and transforming the business into a leader in API technology, the nifty software that enables one application to talk to another. This capability has enabled Sochitel to create a platform offering some 15,000 digital products through a single API, for the promotion of entertainment, dining, the payment of bills, local taxes, education, gaming and many other things: in short, an electronic distribution pipeline. One initial success was a deal with hotels that allowed operators to offer guests the ability to access and charge mobile phone top-ups to their bills. On each transaction which uses its technology, Sochitel makes a small percentage, but many tens of thousands of small percentages add up to a very big number!
In his early years, Jerry described the business as like a pirate ship, with no fixed course but constantly changing tack to seize the next opportunity to come its way. A huge amount of effort was expended on chasing lots of little deals rather than securing a few big ones. "We were a B2C business that needed to become a B2B business," says Jerry. "And we needed to become a partner, not a vendor." In 2016 the firm took a step along the way when it merged with a business that offered complimentary services to African banks, and the enlarged business expanded further across the continent.
By 2018 Jerry was operating mainly from London. Now in his late 40s, he took what many might see as an unusual step of enrolling for an MBA at Cranfield. His primary motivation, he says, was to understand the M&A language. "I was talking all the time to finance guys, a lot of them with MBAs, and it was clear to me that I did not fully understand the language of finance. I thought if I wanted to speak their language, I needed an MBA. As simple as that." At Cranfield he got a lot more than he bargained for. "Sure, I learned about finance. But the big thing I discovered was leadership. Leadership is the key to everything. If you are going to build an organisation everyone needs to know exactly what they are doing and you, as the leader, have to trust people to do their jobs. You also have to have diversity. In the early days we had almost no women in the company. Now women are over 35% of the Group’s workforce with many in leadership positions”.
Cranfield also provided an added bonus. Jerry recruited senior members of his team from among his classmates, one of them a former Lt Col in the British Army. "It's awesome," says Jerry, "To have someone who knows how to structure an organisation like the British armed forces. We're not a pirate ship anymore – we are the British navy!"
His investment in a business school education paid off unexpectedly, as he learned to speak the language of corporate M&A. In 2021 IDT, an NYSE- listed US corporation based in Newark, New Jersey, made an offer which resulted in IDT acquiring a majority stake in Sochitel itself. IDT Corporation offers cloud and traditional communications services and enables Sochitel to spread its wings even further to achieve a global footprint. The world is truly Jerry Ejikeme's oyster to live a fulfilling life and make a significant impact.
To learn more about Sochitel, its capabilities and ambitions, visit
