SecureID Limited, founded by one of Africa’s leading women entrepreneurs, Kofo Akinkugbe, has commissioned a SIM Card manufacturing line to support the needs of Nigeria’s rapidly growing mobile telecoms sector. Launched in 2005, SecureID is an independent, privately owned company located in Lagos, Nigeria that manufactures banking and telecom cards with mag stripe and chip encoding. This new manufacturing line ensures SecureID will continue to lead the way in delivering ‘innovative and first to market’ card technology and solutions.
This new SIM Card line is a major achievement in the domestication of strategic inputs in the nation’s telecommunications sector. Speaking about the launch, Kofo Akinkugbe said: “this facility is the result of a bold vision and absolute confidence in the underlying strength and strategic importance of the Nigerian economy and resonates as a pivotal strategy for growth of the nation’s Telecoms industry especially in the area of Local manufacturing of SIM cards.” She added that the SecureID SIM manufacturing Line represents a source of national pride and will greatly help in the preservation of foreign exchange in the Telecoms sector (GSM) and provide proximate location for the numerous Telecoms companies in the country to locally source SIM Cards with exact high quality, global standards and competitive pricing. Since its inception in 2005, SecureID has developed vast experience and deployed various digital solutions for the banking sector, public sector, Special ID projects and now, telecoms. Its world class plant located in the heart of Lagos, is fully certified by the requisite global industry organisations, including EMV, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), ISO 9001:2008, adhering to global standards. SecureID is fully equipped and well positioned to provide and deliver smooth end-to-end card roll-out services. The plant currently has an installed capacity for producing 200 million cards per annum with scope for future expansions.
About Kofo Akinkugbe
Kofo Akinkugbe is the Founder and CEO of SecureID Limited, a Mastercard, Visa and Verve certified card personalization firm in West Africa, and foremost in the leading edge of in-territory Smartcard production solutions. She has taken SecureID into the international global market by attaining the most desired VISA and Mastercard International certifications, making it the first in West and Central Africa. She has also led the company into a number of strategic international partnerships across four continents. A prize-winning graduate of Mathematics of the University of Lagos, Kofo spent 12 years in banking, first at International Merchant Bank (local affiliate of the First National Bank of Chicago) and then as a pioneer staff of Chartered Bank, during which time she was awarded a British Government Scholarship to study for an MBA at the Strathclyde Graduate Business School in Scotland, UK. She is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the Smartcard Society of Nigeria which seeks among other things to promote the use of varied card solutions such as Debit cards, etc among the Nigerian populace. Kofo has a wide appreciation of business issues gained from her extensive International Business Travel and Professional Training perspectives and has been the recipient of awards including the 2012 Africa Award for Entrepreneurship, Wimbiz, and the Financial 2012 Technology Awards for the female IT personality of the year.