Visa Hosts Second Demo Day Cohort of Africa Fintech Accelerator

Here’s a glimpse of some of the Fintech start ups that presented to investors, at Demo Day;

Vaultpay, based in Kinshasa in the DRC and represented by Co-Founder and CFO Christel Ilaka – is a digital venching platform for the 30 million users who has a smartphone in DRC, but not just 30 million for now, as each year that number is growing at a rate of three percent. The company has built a mobile first application that allow customers to have instant access to a Visa card, and then also the other banking services, like opening a bank account. Vaultpay is currently flighting their project on a pilot phase, as they finalize the licensing requirements from the central bank. The company has also saw about 2 000 downloads of their application so far, and continues to receive enquiries from customers to use their application. “We have received a lot of feedback which allowed us to even rebuild the entire app and launch the second version of the app, and it validated assumptions we had from the beginning – which is people want to be able to order online and also physically”, says Christel Ilaka.

Checkups Medical is a healthcare provider with a difference. It is a finance, embedded, healthcare benefits trading platform that was founded in Kenya but is now expanded to Juba in South Sudan, and is looking to expand to other African countries that are South of the Sahara. Started in 2018, Checkups Medical discovered that their customers were still borrowing in order to buy medication after they got the prescriptions. They further discovered that for women, they were delaying care for much longer so that they could bring their children and also that they could find money to pay. For men, it was even worse – they were suffering to the point where their healthcare outcomes were becoming so much worse, because they’re not taking themselves to hospital or to the clinic. “And so, we embedded financing and then we removed a lot of the overheads so that our clients can borrow and borrow from safe institutions not from family, friend, employers, but can borrow from safe institutions and can pay for and buy health care benefits on our platform.”, says Renee Ngamau, Co-Founder and President at Checkups Medical Hub.

Thierno Sakho is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer for Proboutik, based in Senegal. Proboutik is a fintech solution with ambition to digitize informal businesses, like spaza shops in South Africa. The company is building a digital bookkeeping to replace the notebook they used to have. Proboutik replaces all this by a digital solution where they can record their daily operation, record their receivables, can send payment reminder, so it creates trust between buyers and sellers. “So, we connect them, we have Community Finance actors, micro finance companies, banks – because it creates a new opportunity for those banks to be able to reach this new kind of customer they do not know in general.”, says Thierno Sakho.

Truzo – derived from the words trust and zone, Truzo is a digital escrow payment platform, that helps you create your personal or business trust zone when transacting. What does that mean? It means that, you know how it is when you buy something from someone or you pay up front online or real world, and then they never deliver on the product or service, they deliver the wrong thing. Or It’s just not done – How do you solve for this? Truzo holds the buyers’ funds securely in trust and only releases payment to the seller or the service provider, when there’s completed delivery of the product or service.

In that way the buyer gets exactly what they’re paying for, and the seller gets paid within 24 hours after delivery of the product service. “We’re solving for the pandemic of scams, corruption and late payments when transacting. We’ve been recognized by the UK government, as one of South Africa’s top seven Tech Innovations at the time. We’ve completed just under 1.5 billion Rand worth of transactions, with a billion Rand being completed in the last 12 months alone. We’re approved by the South African, regulator of the Financial Sector Conduct Authority. We’ve also set up our HQ in the UK and we approved by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority and we’re the escrow provider in the continent to have both these regulatory approvals.’, says Terence Naidu, Founder and CEO of Truzo.