Ahh @spokentwice is a pro! In his eyes,VoguePay is relevant in most instances or conversations. So I can imagine someone complaining about the weather and saying ‘this rain is too much’. Oluwole will reply, 'Yes I agree. It reminds me of one VoguePay conference when it rained a lot…
Having said that, I personally feel he’s a top guy and provides a lot (his articles, comments etc) to this community, beyond evangelising for his company. And I respect him for that.
You’re right, your analogy is way off! No need to invent fictional examples, look at Stripe or Google that’s been mentioned already. This is not new and the model has been tested in different variations already.
But let’s kill this ‘developer’ issue once and for all. Look at below from the N30K certification, what do you call this person? According to InterSwitch, the participant will be expected to keep the payment switch operating optimally and become ‘payment implementation engineer at foundation level’.
There’s also a deeper issue about this whole ‘certification’ thing. I understand our love for ‘certificates’. We love titles and acronyms behind & in front of our names. It makes us feel good and important. In real life, most of those things are meaningless!
Passing through this particular programme will give meaningful knowledge, but the ‘certificate’ itself is meaningless. This played to our deep psyche and obsession with paper and to add insult upon injury, they’re charging for it. Very soon, folks will start plastering it on their CVs like they’ve achieved something whereas employers in payments, know they were conned and this doesn’t prove anything.
This is exactly what its all about and what I wanted you to arrive at all along…let’s pretend the developer angle doesn’t exist and focus on the program. Perhaps, it might interest you to know VISA, MCARD, Remita etc offer such programs to banks. These trainings are relevant in their domain.
ISW is only looking to deepen its purse using training as a tool.
Which with the way they are doing is VERY Wrong.
But these are not banks. The target here are young people, just starting out in their professional life. So why charge them? Ohh, I know…someone smart thought of making some more money. Good for them.
But permit me to say what I’ve already said before, Nigeria is a weird country.
In any case, I change my tune. InterSwitch are too generous, N30k is way too cheap! They should pay N150k for the training certificates. After all, even chicken change is money!
And @blacquay you’re an accountant (just like me), so remember when ICAN used to boast that only few people passed their exams yearly? Before ACCA came to eat their dinner and packed away all their students (all these foreigners are bad). Well, here’s another idea for Interswitch, why not introduce a cut off mark for this certification. In that way, even fewer people can have this certificates and it will as valuable as gold.
Hope this hug 
goes round to @ukay @blacquay @Freshboi_Ekundayo and especially to @PapaOlabode for your nice words, especially this comment that kept me ROTFL
QOTD, you are the winner!!!
I just passed out few months ago. Can confirm as a corper I wouldn’t pay for anything if I could avoid it.
