Birth of John Santhosh

Horror stories from Africa didn’t scare me much. First trip to Nigeria in Ethiopian Airlines was my first international travel so it was more of excitement than fear.Had a stop over in Addis Ababa with a small city tour of this fantastic African nation before getting to Lagos.
It was just after military rule in Nigeria and when you land into Lagos airport you are welcomed by many with all possible suggestions. I heard this line ‘What for me’ on my first day at Lagos airport and I still hear that from Africa…………….
I started staying with the engineers who support few banks that use older version of the software and I was tasked to sell the new state of the art technical avatar of this old software!
Quickly I understood that these young engineers who stay with me are actually been punished for the sins committed by some brilliant developers in India. These ‘Hyenas’ travel in the night for something called “EOD Support” and during day take the beating of the customer for the sins committed by someone else. Over time I realized, its part of the strategy to send ‘Hyenas’ with software once you have made the ‘sales kill’!
With no IT knowledge or banking knowledge how to sell this new state of the art technical avatar of the old software to banks in Nigeria was a big question for me. Only way I could think is to get connected to the decision makers in some other level and that changed ‘J P Santhosh’ to ‘John Santhosh’ and I became an ‘Evangelist’ of technology in Africa.
John Santhosh started attending Sunday mass and was the only Indian in the church. In a month’s time I had details of all bankers coming to this HNI church and had even attended multiple services on the same day to meet with them after mass. That worked well and contact list was growing.
I started learning banking from the’ Hyenas’ (some of them were civil and mechanical engineers). We all agreed that we went to Engineering College to become engineers but bankers didn’t go to any specialized school to become a banker, so we can learn banking seeing the ‘code’ of the software!
We had a ‘vulture’ with us that time in the country. He is a functional expert who joined the IT Company from the bank and was also feeding from the same ‘kill’. His job was to go and correct the suspense account that gets build up every night because software didn’t know what to do with many transactions and where to post them.
Working with these ‘Hyenas’ and ‘Vultures’, I became a true banking technology evangelist in few months.