•Says auction market huge, untapped

•Advocates for regulation, professionalism

By Nnamdi Ojiego

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. Excerpts:

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?



https://www.vanguardngr.com/2025/03/how-e-auctions-are-reshaping-nigerias-market-nwaukor-lagos-cian-boss/