Uganda’s Eversend, a digital-only financial services marketplace, is raising over €850,000 to expand to Nigeria, Francophone Africa and Europe.
Eversend has been raising the funds via crowdfunding platform Seedrs since May, for a 7.67% equity stake.
The low cost cross-border money transfer, currency exchange, multi currency accounts and bill payments firm also recently launched a Donations feature to allow users to give to their favourite charities.
With the cash, Eversend expects to beef up its product and engineering team, accelerate user acquisition and expand into new markets.
“We intend to expand our offering to Nigeria, Francophone Africa, and Europe to make a real connection between Diaspora and Africa,” announced the firm. ” Some of the funds will remain in company accounts as working capital to beef up our netting off reserves. When we close our seed round, some of the funds will be used for regulatory compliance.”
Beyond sending money across borders, Eversend makes it possible for customers to be able to save, buy insurance, pay bills, get credit via their mobile phones.
The platform aims to help users to save, exchange, and send money at the best possible rates, both online and offline.
“Financial services in Africa are disintegrated, expensive, and inconvenient. The continent’s insurance penetration is less than 3%, 7% has access to credit, and people can pay over 32% for a cross-border money transfer. We think the root of this problem is that 66% of people in Africa do not have a bank account,” announced the firm.
Available on Android and iOS, with a USSD platform coming soon, Eversend says the most painful problem that Africans face in financial services is that the whole continent needed an innovative solution for so badly. It wants to solve that problem.
As of 2018, there was over $47 billion in money transfers received in Sub Saharan Africa each year. Of this, over $26 billion is coming from the rest of the world, where the market is already dominated by players like TransferWise, Wave and WorldRemit.
“We choose to focus on intra-Africa money transfers, where the remaining $21 billion is transferred, as well as money transfers from Sub Saharan Africa to the rest of the world, totalling $14.2 billion annually,” announced the firm. “For this market there is, as far as we’re aware, no digital solution. It is still dominated by Western Union and MoneyGram. This means fees potentially exceeding 30%, a bus ride to the nearest city, and waiting in line. Eversend integrates with mobile money platforms and costs 2.5-4%.”
Launched in March 2019, the firm has $1.4m in gross transaction volumes with a monthly organic growth often reaching over 30%. It has received investment from Atomico, Techstars, and Fast Track Capital. Eversend has been accelerated by Techstars, Station F, Nasdaq, Fast Track Malmo and Google Launchpad.
Theplatform makes money via foreign exchange commissions, commissions from third-party partners and billers who get paid or sell through Eversend like phone credit payments and is moving into loans to generate interest income.
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