The experience from Lagos to Ganvie, a lake village in Benin republic, is about 150km. The village’s 35,000 folks dwell in a scenic surroundings that invites curious tourists who’ve dubbed it the Venice of Africa.
However like quite a lot of cities within the french-speaking international locations in Africa, Ganvie has an issue; it’s a pretty underdeveloped city when it comes to monetary companies. It has lodges, a cluster of sights for sore eyes, however only one financial institution.
Certainly, francophone Africa doesn’t get as a lot consideration in discussions round fintech in Africa. Funds startups in Nigeria, huge banks in South Africa and cellular cash in East Africa occupy many of the airwaves. However that doesn’t imply there aren’t firms pushing the envelope within the french-speaking area.
Meet, Bizao.
Based in 2019 by Aurélien Duval-Delort, the startup is constructing out a mixture of economic companies for the area by specializing in three principal service areas: service provider fee, provider billing, and cash switch.
Duval-Delort says the mission is to contribute to a extra inclusive financial system by leveraging the ability of cellular funds. The considered constructing an Africa-focused fintech firm first got here to him whereas he was the pinnacle of the innovation division for Africa at Orange, the French multinational telecommunications firm.
Seeing as many firms wished to work with Orange in varied international locations on the identical time, Duval-Delort’s concept was to construct a single API product to attach all Orange associates. However the mission pivoted to 1 that integrates know-how from a number of operators.
Just a little over 18 months later, Bizao is now a cross-border funds community current in a minimum of 10 international locations in francophone Africa and has processed near 300 million transactions, in keeping with Duval-Delort.
Their most mature product but is the direct billing service which is lively in all of the international locations the place they function. Bizao’s funds infrastructure consists of a number of partnerships with pan-African banks (majorly Ecobank, UBA, and Orabank), telcos (MTN, Orange, Moov, and many others) and worldwide funds firms Visa and Mastercard who allow worldwide transfers.
Like most fee fintechs, Bizao makes cash by charging commissions on transactions enabled by their platforms.
Bizao did develop out of Orange and is headquartered in Paris, France however Duval-Delort emphasizes the startup’s Africanness. His standards? “The place you create worth and with whom.”
He says 80% of their workers is African. Nearly all of their IT workforce is stationed at Dakar led by Natasha Dimban, the corporate’s CTO. They’ve a product workforce primarily based in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.
Duval-Delort additionally says the startup is starting to look past the francophone area to English-speaking markets in Africa. Nevertheless, the primary attraction for them would be the presence of current cellular cash infrastructure that may be leveraged to construct out monetary companies that may attain most of a inhabitants.
Whereas Bizao might not have direct-to-consumer apps, Duval-Delort is satisfied of the worth they create for customers by powering cellular cash transfers and worldwide remittances in francophone Africa. “We’ve a telco DNA which helps us rather a lot within the cellular cash enterprise,” he says.
This “telco DNA” is helpful in holding them distinctive within the rising competitors between fintechs and banks throughout Africa.
“We see that there’s some type of battle between telcos and banks, however we don’t select sides. Our price lies in the truth that we’re above that competitors. No matter fee works for retailers, we combine it for them,” Duval-Delort says.
With this method, he hopes to increase Bizao’s presence within the francophone area to cowl an addressable market of about 300 million folks, by his estimation. At the moment, they serve a 3rd of that quantity.
The large imaginative and prescient is to create a reliable community of economic companies that penetrate each city, each metropolis. From Dakar to Ganvie, and past.
