Ghana’s Takyi-Appiah is building the largest payments company

When Ghanaian financial services company Zeepay started in 2014, it was hoping to solve a challenge that most Africans constantly struggle with: Access to finance.

Ghanaian entrepreneur Andrew Takyi-Appiah dreamed of building a platform that would provide solutions to millions of Africans who don’t have access to any form of banking product or service.

Zeepay wanted to solve a very specific a challenge. A challenge that people who walk on average 20 kilometers to cash out less than 100 dollars received from a loved one in Europe, Asia, or Americas, still face.

Barely 10 years down the road, Zeepay is on track to achieve that, thanks to the growing demand for financial services. It now counts millions of clients under its belly and billions worth of transactions that have been processed through the platform that was built through trial and error.

“Our life time mission is to improve the financial inclusion narrative at Zeepay, through reduction in cost of remittances, expanding remittances,” Takyi-Appiah, Founder & Managing Director of Zeepay, said recently.

Zeepay is a payments processing firm that facilitates the instant settlement of remittances into mobile money wallets in Africa and the Caribbean on behalf of leading international money transfer organizations such as Visa, Ria, Western Union, MoneyGram, and Mastercard.

It started with Ghana before sprawling to Zambia, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Gambia, and then Barbados in the Caribbean. In total, they are in 23 countries and counting.

What Zeepay has solved so far is a tiny portion of a myriad of challenges that Africa face. They have just scratched the surface.

However, they have made leaps into the industry that has enabled many startups to make a decent return: Financial technology (Fintech).

Between 2020 and 2021, the number of tech start-ups in Africa tripled to around 5,200 companies. Just under half of these are fintechs, which are making it their business to disrupt and augment traditional financial services.1 McKinsey analysis shows that African fintechs have already made significant inroads into the market, with estimated revenues of around $4 billion to $6 billion in 2020 and average penetration levels of between 3 and 5 per cent (excluding South Africa).

To be precise, last year Zeepay alone settled over 10 million remittance transactions worth over $3 billion in value.

How have they done it?

Money.

You have probably heard a statement over and over that money is king. Well, it is, at least for thousands if not hundreds of African startups that want to venture out into solving some of the continent’s pressing challenges.

Many startups have attempted to operate only to failure miserably because of the failure to raise necessary funding to keep them going.

There is a reason why startups in Silicon Valley tend to be more successful than elsewhere: because they have access to a pull of funding that arguably the rest of the world doesn’t.

Takyi-Appiah himself admits attempting to establish several startups as an undergraduate student and during my stay in the UK and failed. He decided to return to Ghana.

Upon returning to his Ghana, he secured a role at Nestle, eventually landing him in the banking sector.

“One time after closing a deal in South Africa, I thought about the possibility of building a payment system that would be independent of the Mobile network and then came Zeepay,” he narrated in 2022.

Having attempted to establish and run three startups, Takyi-Appiah and his wife managed to nurture Zeepay as the fourth startup in a streak of attempted failures, until 2016 when investors started coming on board.

At the first three startups – an online platform for renting rooms, a digital retail store selling Kente stoles, and a water business – Takyi-Appiah failed because he didn’t understand the concept of money management and how to reinvest in the company.

The entrepreneur neither had clue about how to manage concentration risk, and the concept of supplier management, nor did he have knowledge and experience about managing human resources.

The Ghanaian startup founder would go on to use these lessons and experiences to shape his company to where it is now – a multimillion dollar global business.

In its early days, Zeepay managed to convince investors to invest in the startup. Two of early investors exited their initial investment of $24,000 in 2015 and the startup raised $940,000 in seed funding in 2020.

In 2021, Zeepay acquired Zambia’s emerging financial technology startup Mangwee, securing a 51 per cent position in a move that was aimed at expanding its footprint to Mozambique, Namibia, Malawi, and Angola.  

The same year, it closed its Series A fundraising at a tune of $7.9 million from investors such as Investisseurs & Partenaires (I&P), ARK Holdings, the Takyi-Appiah family, GOODsoil VC, as well as Absa Bank Ghana and First National Bank Ghana.

In 2022, it raised $10 million debt round.

Latest round

The company has announced they have secure equity funding from their latest fundraising from major pan-African investors, including Africa54 which finances infrastructure projects.

The fintech firm closed $14 million funding round in its expansion drive. This was led by Africa50, Oikocredit, Injaro, Verdant Capital Hybrid Fund, and I&P.  

According to Takyi-Appiah, the latest funds raised from pan-African investors will greatly assist them to complete the on-going expansion drive into the rest of Africa.

“Our short to medium plan is to expand our mobile money reach into a minimum of 10 countries within the next 2 years leveraging remittances in partnership with MoneyGram and delighted to see this vision come through,” he said.

Zeepay raised an additional $3 m from Verdant Capital as part of the same round.

This brings Zeepay’s total raised equity capital to-date to $23 million since inception.

“We believe this is the phase we would achieve our Unicorn status,” Takyi-Appiah said recently in a LinkedIn post while celebrating its 10th year of existence.

It looks like investors’ appetite into Zeepay will continue to grow for the time being given its potential to deliver, because believe it or not, no investor would want to invest in a company that doesn’t deliver.

This also tells the story of the potential that Africa’s fintech space has, and how, if African startups position themselves strategically, they can attract millions in funding.