On the 17th of June 2022 iT360 Magazine held an interview with the CEO and Co-founder of LegitCar. The interview was set to recognize one of the few tech startups making their mark in Nigeria. Diving into the interview iT360 Magazine began by asking the CEO some questions.
Can we meet you?
My name is Vincent Okeke, the Co-founder and CEO of LegitCar, a company that helps individual car buyers and organizations to ensure they can properly report stolen vehicles and also purchase the right vehicle with no sort of encumbrance and also in good maintenance condition.
What exactly is vehicle verification to a layman?
I should give a brief history of how LegitCar came about to answer this question. LegitCar was incorporated in 2018 when I tried acquiring a used car and found out there was no means for me to check whether the car was a stolen car or not. This stirred up my desire to find a solution to this lagging situation, which brought about a discussion between me and my friends on how to profer a long lasting solution to this problem, as a result we discovered that due to lack of data services in Nigeria, verifying whether a vehicle was stolen or not could not be done. LegitCar was then incorporated to help individuals or business owners to be aware whether the vehicle they are about to purchase is being sold to them by the rightful owner or the owner is well aware of the sale and it is not a stolen vehicle that is being sold to them.
Today, LegitCar is building “Africa’s Biggest Vehicle Data Service” with various services to be rendered in different facet which would shape your decision making in areas like vehicle purchase decisions, vehicle insurance decisions, efficient law enforcement, vehicle maintenance decisions and so on.
Is it a one man idea or there are others behind LegitCar?
“No single person or organization can do what we are doing” that is to describe the magnitude of what LegitCar actually does.
Considering the Bureaucracy system of Nigeria, how was LegitCar able to scale through getting to the Nigerian police, other stakeholders and bringing them together?
LegitCar does not have a formal partnership with any Law Enforcement Agency in Nigeria but we get reports from a few Police Officers on our platform. However, for individuals and companies to be able to report a vehicle stolen on our platform they’re required to have first reported the vehicle stolen to the Police, an agreement is signed to that effect before moving forward on the platform.
With partnerships from companies like Carfax in the United States of America with vehicle history reports, that informs you on the real mileage of the car before it was shipped to Nigeria. Connecting to Carfax data gave access to billion of vehicle history data around the world. Which springed up other partnerships like Dimdox in Lithuania in Europe, Clerging in United States of America and a host of others, which has granted us access to 95% of vehicles in the world today. “Partnerships helped us to do more with less”.
LegitCar is the top 3 Reporting Missing Vehicles in Nigeria. From 2020-2021 LegitCar has been able to help at least 11 users recover their vehicle that was about to be resold to other users.
We are currently on LegitCar 1.0, soon we will be launching LegitCar 2.0 which is the Vehicle Prepurchase Verification, which enables us to protect you when you are about to purchase a vehicle with the Carfax report, a physical inspection to check the vehicles health how the vehicle is faring, finally, a recent partnership would give us the ability to call the owner of the vehicle if it is a registered vehicle to confirm whether they intend to sell the vehicle or not.
Statically, how has LegitCar helped Nigerians in making quality decisions when it comes to purchasing a car?
“Since 2018, LegitCar has helped car buyers verify vehicle purchase transactions worth over Thirteen Million dollars ($13,000,000), we have acquired over 7,000 users and over 2,000 of those have paid for our services”.
Have you received any Formal Compensation from the government or external body or donors?
LegitCar was named one of the best Justice Innovations in the World at Netherlands and is also a beneficiary of Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurs. We also received a recognition from the Vice President of Nigeria Prof. Yemi Osinbajo.
What is the entire process of reporting a car on the platform?
The first thing you are expected to do is to report to the police, we are not the police. Once you report to the police and you start the process of getting a police report you can proceed to report to our platform.
You then sign an undertaking on the platform to certify that you have reported to the police by click a button provided on the platform, similar to you agreeing to terms and conditions. If you do not clock the undertaking you cannot proceed further on the platform.
Once that is done, you go to our website legitcar.ng and click on report a missing vehicle. A form will be provided to you, asking for your name, your contact details (phone number and email), the chasis number of your vehicle. Your phone number and email is required in other to contact you in case any information on the vehicle arises.
Once the information has been reported, we now put it up on the platform. It then becomes visible where everyone can see it. Before the information is put on the platform it has to first be approved at the backend, once it is approved at the backend it goes into the database. So when someone makes a search and it matches with that of your vehicle we then contact you to inform you of such resemblance.
Why is it necessary for Business Owners to make use of LegitCar?
Well, it is important for the reputation of the business to be intact on purchasing the right product for the use of the business and they also get to spend the company’s funds on the best quality of product and maintenance services.
How secured is LegitCar with People’s Data?
LegitCar is very secure as we make use of the most secured platforms in the world in “Microsoft Azure” which protects us from any sort of security threats on the platform. People have tried but they go back empty handed.
Is LegitCar Free?
LegitCar services are absolutely free for persons who want to report their vehicle stolen. However, we charge a price of One Thousand Five Hundred naira (#1,500) for person’s who intend to check whether their vehicle is a stolen one or not.