No guaranteed availability
A planner rings down a list hoping someone picks up and happens to be free. There is no way to see who is actually available before calling.
ShiftPulse is a marketplace for hourly and shift cover — event ushers, security, warehouse and factory floor. A business posts a shift, the full cost is locked in escrow before any shifter sees it, nearby shifters claim slots first-come, and pay lands the second the shift is confirmed done.
Replacing the phone calls and WhatsApp broadcasts Nigerian businesses use to cover short-notice shifts today.
Event ushers · Victoria Island
Filling now
Locked in escrow
₦48,000
Each usher gets
₦8,000
Funded before the shift went live. Not when someone accepts — before anyone even sees it.
01 — The problem
Event planners, security firms and warehouse operators source short-term cover through phone calls and WhatsApp broadcasts to personal contacts. That process has three structural weaknesses — and all three land on the shifter.
A planner rings down a list hoping someone picks up and happens to be free. There is no way to see who is actually available before calling.
A shifter who verbally agrees can still fail to show, and the business has no recourse. The shifter has no guarantee the shift is real either.
Shifters are paid cash on the day if the client remembers, or told to wait. No enforceable guarantee, no record, no recourse.
Where this came from
A small event-planning business owner we know personally still calls around individually to source ushers for every single event. Not as a market study — as a Tuesday. That exact workflow is what ShiftPulse digitises.
02 — The solution
Category, site, dates and hours, how many shifters, how far to reach. Choose your rate structure — by the hour, by the day, or a flat amount for the whole engagement.
The system calculates the total and the exact amount each shifter will receive, shows you both, and escrows the full sum. A shift that fails to fund never reaches a single shifter.
Broadcast reaches shifters who have that category unlocked and whose location falls inside both your radius and their own travel radius. Both have to agree.
Shifters claim instantly — no "maybe, we will call you back". At full headcount the shift closes itself and later arrivals join a waitlist.
The shifter checks in on site. Your contact taps confirm once at the end, and payment lands in seconds. If nobody confirms, it releases automatically anyway.
If the business contact forgets, goes home, or simply never opens the app, the payment releases on its own once the window after the shift's listed end time elapses. The failure mode points at paying the shifter, not at withholding.
03 — What is actually new here
On-demand shift cover is a proven model abroad — Instawork, Shiftgig and GigSmart run it at scale in the US and UK. None of it is localised to these Nigerian categories, and no app-based broadcast-claim-and-instant-pay system was found for event ushers, security or warehouse casual crew in this market as of August 2026. What makes it trustworthy enough to matter is engineering, and each guarantee below is enforced by the database rather than by code that a retry or a race could slip past.
Escrow completes before a broadcast becomes visible to anyone. The trust model is not "we intend to pay" — a shift nobody funded is a shift no shifter ever sees. This is the invariant everything else rests on.
Simultaneous claims on the final slot are a real race, not a hypothetical. Assignment runs inside a transaction with a row-level lock on the remaining-slot counter and a check constraint underneath. Not a check-then-write.
Manual confirmation and the auto-release scheduler can fire at the same claim. A unique constraint inside the payout transaction is what makes a double payout impossible — not a prior lookup that could go stale between read and write.
Each shifter's pay is computed once when the shift is created and frozen onto the record. Payout reads that figure instead of dividing the escrow at release time, which would leave the last shifter a kobo short. Money is integer kobo end to end — no floats, anywhere.
In production each shift's escrow sits in a bank-issued virtual account scoped to that shift — never a ShiftPulse account. The bank stays the regulated party holding the money, which keeps ShiftPulse outside the money-transmitting licensing regime by design.
NIN for shifters and RC/BN for businesses verify live against government-backed registry lookups through Dojah and QoreID. Not mocked for the demo — those credentials are in hand and the lookups actually run.
04 — What it changes
Millions of Nigerians earn by the hour and by the shift. The demand is real, the skills are real — what is missing is the infrastructure that makes it dependable on both sides. That is an engineering gap, not a shortage of people willing.
A shift you can count on before you travel to it, and money that arrives the day you earn it. Every completed shift also builds a verifiable record of what they have done — the thing informal cover has never been able to produce.
Fill a shift in minutes instead of an afternoon of phone calls, with people who confirmed they are coming. Escrow means the commitment runs both ways.
Verified identity, funded engagements and an auditable trail turn casual shifts into something a bank, an insurer or a regulator can actually see. That is the precondition for everything that comes after.
Why a bank, and why this one
The escrow-and-instant-payout promise is only credible if the money is really there and really guaranteed — not a status column in a database. That requires a regulated custodian, which is precisely the role a bank plays and ShiftPulse does not want. The commercial logic runs the other way too: every shifter paid through the platform needs a destination account, and every business funding broadcasts keeps an operating balance. ShiftPulse earns from a service fee on completed shifts — never from lending, which is why credit is excluded from the product rather than parked on a roadmap.
05 — What we did not build, and why
Some things in the design are only lawful with a licence ShiftPulse does not hold. Rather than quietly omit them or quietly ship them, each is declared in config/compliance.php with the instrument that would authorise it — and the service that implements it refuses to start until that authorisation exists. The answer to "how are you allowed to do this?" is checkable, not asserted.
The prototype holds no bank credentials, so escrow and payout execute against a simulated implementation of the payment provider contract, recorded on a local ledger. The real adapter is written against the same interface and binds with a one-line change. The escrow state machine — the part carrying the trust guarantee — is fully built and testable today.
Buy-Now-Pay-Later and micro-credit are removed from the product entirely, not deferred. Advancing funds against a casual-labour engagement is lending, and lending sits under a CBN regime the orchestration model exists to stay outside of.
A wallet a shifter can draw down means ShiftPulse is holding customer funds — CBN payment-service-provider territory. Payout goes bank-account to bank-account instead. The wallet screens exist as design and are switched off in code.
Facial verification and continuous location are sensitive personal data under the NDPA 2023, each needing a lawful basis, explicit consent and a DPIA. NIN already gives a government-backed identity check without that exposure. Location is captured only at registration and check-in, each time with a logged reason.
Dispute resolution, no-show reassignment and certification gating are fully designed in the system design document and carried into the mentorship phase rather than rushed into the prototype. They are presented as design work, because that is what they are.
06 — Team
Backend & Systems Architecture
Frontend Web & Mobile Engineer
Frontend Web & Mobile Engineer
Backend Engineer
07 — The programme
Powering Possibilities
Wema Bank's innovation programme for Nigerian founders and builders. ShiftPulse was built for the Future of Work track and qualified for the Lagos leg.
Track
Future of Work
Pitch centre
Lagos
Status
Build-ready, scope frozen
ShiftPulse is an independent submission to Hackaholics 7.0. It is not a Wema Bank product, is not endorsed by Wema Bank, and the prototype is not connected to Wema's banking systems. The payment layer is built against a provider interface so that a real banking integration is a binding change rather than a rewrite.
The whole loop runs end to end — post, fund, match, claim, check in, confirm, pay. Go through it yourself.
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