Fineeeee, I’ll do it myself!

One of my longest time supporters asked me why I am building another fintech. As someone who travels a lot and has quite some knowledge about the African startup scene, to him, it seemed counter-intuitive that I’ll be building another fintech with the many options that exist. He isn’t the only one who has raised this concern and more than once, I’ve given different reasons to different people. Sometimes I just want to avoid the conversation, other times I’m just selling. Well today, I want to say the real reason.

My two co-founders and I are very much like brothers, and we’ve been working together since before we knew the things we want to work on. What makes us uniquely fitted to work with each other is our shared love for convenience and science. Armed with this love, we decided to become the next Bill Gates. In 2019, I got us on a call because Babila Mutia had shared information about the MOMO Hackathon by MTN’s fintech arm. He wanted us to participate in it and we decided to brainstorm on what we could build to participate in the Hackathon. On that day, what we’re building today was first discussed. The big idea at the time was to build contactless payments on MOMO’s infrastructure using NFC. We bounced the idea around each other and decided that we didn’t have the skill or ability to build it and that the market might not understand it. So, we focused on helping other businesses get on the internet and use software technology to unlock opportunities for their businesses with  Enchird .

Even though we weren’t going to build on this idea, we still wanted contactless payments to exist. As earlier mentioned, we’re all lovers of convenience. And we especially love convenience that we don’t have to build ourselves. So, I proceeded to try and convince other people whom we thought were more resourceful and knowledgeable to build this. I decided at some point that NFC will be tricky so QR codes may work better, but Formin Hubert insisted and still insists that NFC will work best, and Babila supports him. They both joined me in trying to get other people to build this. We’ll spend days fantasising on how cool it’ll be to have this innovation on our streets. How cool and practical it’ll be to just board a taxi, scan a QR code and pay, or maybe just dial a USSD code to pay anyone irrespective of the service they use to receive the payment (MTN MOMO, Orange Money or bank) and
irrespective of where your money is when you pay. This thought haunted us daily and kept expanding daily.
Initially, we thought we were building for financial inclusion, however, we now know that what we’re building for, is economic inclusion.

For the longest time, I’ve heard that Cameroonians (Africans) are lazy. And even recently that was thrown in my face again. But when I think about it, I realize that Africans in general and Cameroonians in particular are a lot of things, but lazy isn’t among the things that we are. It’s too common to see someone in my country that was been dutifully doing a job or practicing a craft for 30 years and yet, is still flirting with the poverty line. He/she has earned quite some income but hasn’t tracked it every step of the way, isn’t credit worthy and has been reduced to a life of subsistence. So many African businesses that power the economy and provide very much needed goods and services for the population are operating in the informal sector with zero institutional support. MSMEs are run by people who are pretty hardworking but have no support to help their businesses grow. In Africa, these informal businesses and MSMEs make up more than 60% of the economy of the continent. And yet, these businesses don’t have the tools and best practices to make them very competitive. This is why my friends, and I are building another fintech. We want “informal businesses” and MSMEs in Africa to use their grit and uniqueness to thrive and not just survive as a lot of them are currently doing. Our dream is to make buying, selling, saving and borrowing for business super smart, super traceable and automated.

We have tried to get other people to do it, we have asked banks why they can’t do it. We have wondered quietly and aloud about why no one else seems to want to do it. All that has been futile and unproductive. So, we said to ourselves, “Fine, I’ll do it myself”.

Hopefully, we do it as we will be launching Kwik Nkap V1 in the next 60 days. We can’t wait for you all to come in contact with this brainchild of ours and tell us what you think. We hope that by the time we’re done, African economies will be teeming with life and wealth. For that, we’re willing to go the distance. So, God, help us.