ImaliPay
Africa Fintech as an API
Background
When we look at African financial infrastructure from a bird’s-eye view, we notice an issue of our economies being very fragmented, as each country has different regulations, differing mobile and internet penetrations, and so on.
Embedded finance is the next iteration of fintech. The beauty of embedded finance is that it allows it to help solve some of the most challenging financial problems in the African market, especially in B2B and B2C settings.
Embedded finance is made possible by API infrastructure fueling the products and services that are offered to digital businesses. Low-code APIs make it easy to integrate and leave the more intricate technical complexities to the API provider.
My conviction is that API infrastructure can be the backbone to unifying these fragmented economies and can create network effects, essentially providing a platform as a service. A company that I believe exemplifies that is ImaliPay.
Background
Imali Pay dubs itself as Africa’s Fintech Service API Platform. It is a single API that has over 20 embedded financial products, allowing revenue to grow by 2 to 4x multiples.
It It offers four main products: automated reconciliation, the BNPL engine, payments and ledgers-as-a-service, along with additional value.
added services. ImaliPay boasts a diverse clientele, including FleetSimplify, LipaLater, Propel, and many others across Africa.
Founding Story
ImaliPay was launched in late 2020 by Tatenda Furusa and Oluwasanmi Akinmusire when the founders noticed the challenges found in the gig economy. They noticed ride-hailing drivers struggled with accessing working capital or resolving emergencies like running out of fuel in Nairobi.
CEO Furusa told TechCrunch on a call when asked how the company started. “One time, a Bolt driver ran out of fuel in Nairobi when I was coming from the airport and couldn’t top off immediately. It triggered me to think of what other pains these gig workers might be experiencing.”
The gig economy is only exponentially growing, fueled by the rapid growth of youth. Just to give you an idea of how big of a market it is, there are 80 million gig workers across Africa. The growth of this employment segment in Africa is catalysed by digitization, the young population, persistent unemployment gaps, and the desire for more flexibility in the workplace.
As digital technology continues to evolve, the gig economy becomes more prevalent, as workers want the supplemental income and flexibility that come with the gig economy.
The team at ImaliPay originally started providing a BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) fuel product for two-wheeler gig platforms, partnering with fuel stations in Nigeria to offer this service to SafeBoda riders.
Eventually they started building out complementary services around spare parts, smartphones, power banks, savings and investments, and insurance bundled with those products, like income loss prevention, accident covers, etc., giving these gig workers peace of mind in their undertakings.
Traction
Traction has been phenomenal; according to this article highlighted in TechCrunch, in 15 months of operation, ImaliPay’s userbase has grown by 60x. (This was back in 2022; I can only imagine it grew even more to the present date.)
According to TechCrunch, these gig workers, who the company said are in the “tens of thousands,” access its services across 4,500 vendor points. Over 200,000 transactions have been carried out on ImaliPay’s platform. The pan-African embedded finance provider’s revenues come from transaction and referral fees.
And they raised $3 million in seed funding to expand its financial services infrastructure across Nigeria and its other sub-Saharan markets — Kenya and South Africa — backed by Ten 13, Uncovered Fund, MyAsia VC, Jedar Capital, Logos Ventures, Plug N Play Ventures, Untapped Global, Latam Ventures, Cliff Angels, Chandaria Capital, and Changecom.
