As commerce becomes more digitized, businesses have both the opportunity and responsibility to create improved experiences for their customers. This can be as simple as shortening the turnaround time on answering a customer’s question to making the customer feel like she or he is having a tailored experience with that business.    Today, I sit with Charles Ifedi of Ebanqo, who has built a solution that helps businesses and customers better communicate with one another, and simplify a world with multiple messaging platforms by bringing them together under one roof.    Charles is a serial entrepreneur and fintech unicorn builder who has a thoughtful approach to building products that are supremely influenced by the core needs of its users. He shares with us his entrepreneurial journey, approach to product development, working with offshore developers and team building over his multi-decade career.    If your company is looking to scale its AI initiatives, head over to Tesoro AI (www.tesoroai.com). We are experts in AI strategy, staff augmentation, and AI product development.  Founder Bio:   Charles Ifedi is the founder and CEO of Ebanqo, an omnichannel customer engagement startup that helps businesses aggregate their messaging channels, including webchat, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp. By bundling these channels they help businesses build stronger customer relationships, offer their services on the web, and multiple messaging apps.    Prior to launching Ebanqo, Charles was the pioneer CEO of Verve, Africa’s leading payment card brand. He was also the co-founder of a fintech company, named Inner Switch that was valued at over a billion dollars after receiving an investment from Visa. He’s also worked with American Express, PWC, and Accenture across Africa, Europe and the US. Charles has a doctorate in Business Administration from Georgia State University, an MBA from Cranfield University, and a bachelor’s of science with a specialization in computer science from University of Ilorin.    3:08 - Charles’s early career and entrepreneurial ventures in Fintech 4:00 - How Nigeria and the African continent quickly grew into an internationally relevant tech hub and first mover in popular technology trends like payments and instant transfer 9:20 - Origins of Ebanqo 12:38 - How Ebanqo’s core product works and how it helps businesses better serve their customers  14:59 - Understanding how and when to use AI within Ebanqo’s customer experience, and knowing that a human element is still needed when serving customers 19:37 - How focusing on solving the need of the customer changed his goal of building a fintech business to creating a platform that serves any type of B2C business 21:25 - How Charles learned to sell into industries that he didn’t have previous experience in  23:06 - Building the Ebanqo product and partnering with a dev shop for the MVP  26:01 -The most important thing to think about when building a product  27:03 - How to successfully work with a dev shop  33:01 - Building the Ebanqo Team  35:43 - How Charles approached fundraising for Ebanqo  37:56 - How does Charles and the team differentiate Ebanqo from other players in the market