PayRep

Business owners across rural communities have a major challenge due to the nature of their informal trading records, they are unable to have access to credit/loans services to grow their businesses / scale up for expansion. 

Banks and established institutions consider them a high risk portfolio due to lack of records of transactions as they hardly keep any records of their sales. 

Post COVID-19 in 2020, several of these kind of businesses closed shops in Africa due to paucity of funds to continue to run their businesses. 

The impacts of COVID-19 is still having varying untoward effects on small scale traders till date. 

We are providing both credit access and digitizing credit worthiness records (based on repayments and transactions volumes) for rural communities cornershops. Our model is to give an average of 100 USD to 200 USD in credit to cornershops in rural communities for restocking their inventory and grow their sales at a moderate charge of 0.5% of the sum advanced which are repaid fully at the end of the week. Our platform uses data intelligence to determine how much a trader can access. We onboard by giving them a Point of Sale/Card Reader device for their payments and collections and based on their volumes of transactions, the platform called PayRep and downloadable via Playstore and IOS determines how much can be accessed which is to be repaid weekly. We also charge 0.5% for their collections and give Aggregators who recruit them across communities and manage them via a given platform on our PayRep application 0.1% of their transactions to enlist them perpetually to advance our growth.

We have processed over 90m USD transactions in the last 6 months with our PSSP license and a tier one Microfinance Bank. Our model is to be extended across Africa where the solution is needed all over. The market has a turnover of over 35B USD turnover in West Africa according to Mckinsey Financial Report. 

The target population for our product are SMEs/Cornershop traders in rural communities. Our solution will provide them credit access and also document their repayments to evidence their credit worthiness as a small business owner. 

Majority of our current SMEs traders are women doing petty trading in rural communities. 

The exposure into financial inclusion and solutions was inspired by our work as one of the pioneers of mobile money in Nigeria. We worked with a company called Teasy Mobile for few years in different capacities before we established our own startup in 2019. 

Our solution came up with the need to empower rural businesses and make them scalable as much as possible. 

We onboard local businesses owners through an Aggregator network. What this means is that we do not spend much on expanding the reach of our solution. The Aggregators in different communities seek out Merchants for us who need our services (payment collections and credit access) and we charge 0.5% of the collections sum and 0.3% for the credit access while the Aggregator is perpetually paid 0.1 percent from all we earn on each merchant/trader. He continues to earn the 0.1 percent as long as the merchants keep on using our solutions. 

The Aggregators are the closest to the traders and we only manage different issues (repayment of credit access, issuance of Point of Sales Terminals) through the Aggregators. 

We have enrolled over 2,000 merchants and they are using our platform for payments collections and credit access/records compilations

We are applying to Solve for three key reasons:

i. Technology: The rate of our growth requires more advanced building of our wallet system technology platform especially to avert and withstand any cyber attacks and we are hopeful that we can achieve this in Solve.

ii. Mentorship: We require a solid mentors networks to help avoid costly mistakes and critique our solutions where necessary

iii. Fund Raising: With being a part of Solve, fund raising is necessary going to be much easier and we need funding to scale the solution across West Africa.