Izazi says that it has found a niche in a number of banking industry micro-verticals, such as development finance and agricultural banking. The core technology that Izazi offers to this sector is its SME-tailored SAP All-in-One Platform, which aims to allow financial services companies, irrespective of their size, to successfully implement and utilise SAP software.
 
Through the companys association with SAP, Izazi has implemented SAP banking solutions locally at the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) and the Land Bank projects which, Izazi says, gave it strong development finance and agricultural lending experience.
 
Says Izazis executive director, Brad Scott-King: Following the success of the IDCs implementation, we were contacted by Botswanas Citizen Entrepreneurial Development Agency (Ceda), who appointed Izazi to custom build a loan origination and mentoring tool, which interfaces with Cedas core SAP Loans Management architecture. Izazi also supports Cedas SAP Loans Management solution. This project really started the ball rolling. It gave us a good profile in Botswana, and once again we were approached by other similar organisations to implement our SAP solution.
 
As Izazis reputation grew, so did its client base, and within a year the company managed to secure five micro-finance sector clients outside SA three in Namibia and two in Botswana.
 
Izazi says that it has overcome the telecommunications restraints by deploying solutions from Johannesburg via a VPN directly into the client. It has been a costly exercise to set up the required infrastructure, but everything is now in place and is running smoothly. Scott-King says the restraints in Botswana and Namibia have been fairly easy to overcome, but that the real challenge will come in places where there is little or no telecommunications infrastructure.