One of the most important operational challenges businesses face is managing bills. It is largely completed manually therefore its complication, particularly when monitoring and recording. For occasion, it’s a widespread follow in Nigeria for employers to demand that workers preserve receipts of bills incurred and current them to be reimbursed. This signifies that workers must collate each paper and digital receipts and label them accordingly earlier than submitting, a course of that may result in omission error and even fraud. What occurs in circumstances the place an worker misplaces receipts or chooses to tamper with the quantities on them? It turns into tough to verify the validity of the declare.
This is the issue Allawee, a Nigerian fintech headquartered in San Francisco, is fixing with its all-in-one financial platform. The startup has constructed a suite of financial software program and {hardware} that takes away the effort of expense administration and reduces the error and fraud ratio to zero.
Allawee, a B2B fintech based by Ikenna Enenwali and Oreofe Olurin in 2022, permits entrepreneurs to create enterprise accounts, deposit cash, and spend by way of each bodily and digital playing cards—powering business-to-business transactions by way of card fee. “We are building a financial control platform for businesses,” Enenwali advised TechCabal over a Google Meet name.
The platform provides control to founders, accountants, managers or anyone with a designated authority to deal with the enterprise account. Allawee, by way of its partnership with Providus financial institution, gives a enterprise present account to its customers. Users can load their account with cash and create naira or greenback playing cards or each to spend cash bodily anyplace in Nigeria or just about on-line. Businesses can create a vast variety of playing cards, relying on the variety of workers they intend to provide. Once an worker spends by way of the Allawee card, the platform routinely data it with receipts and descriptions. This removes the prospect of fraudulent actions and saves time throughout auditing.
For occasion, a enterprise proprietor can select to price range for a undertaking to be undertaken by a specific worker, and create a new card for the undertaking or load up an current card utilized by the workers. The proprietor may also arrange completely different controls like every day spend, or markup a spend for a specific exercise like meals or fueling of automobiles. Enenwali stated that businesses may even set controls on the precise filling station to purchase gasoline and the precise place to eat. This signifies that the cardboard is not going to work exterior of the preset controls.
At the purpose of reporting, all enterprise homeowners must do is to extract the small print and export them into no matter third celebration platform they want. “This saves time and removes doubts when recording expenses,” Enenwali added.
Building a financial ecosystem
Allawee is barely two years previous and has pivoted twice. The unique concept that birthed the corporate was to resolve lack of credit score and capital for small businesses on the continent. So it launched as a bank card lender, however alongside the road, it grew to become obvious that the corporate’s threat evaluation wasn’t robust as a result of they weren’t aware of buyer’s credit score data. “The actual credit risk data was a problem in Nigeria, there was not enough data for us to figure out who was a good borrower and who was not. So we decided to build our own credit risk API aggregator,” Enemwali advised TechCabal.
With its API and internet app, Allawee simplified the method of accessing a number of credit score bureaus for credit score checks and reporting. With one API name, prospects had been capable of obtain reviews throughout the three main credit score bureaus—CRC Bureau Credit Limited, CR Services Credit Bureau PLC, and First Central Credit Bureau Limited. But as time went on, that grew to become inadequate, as the corporate was nonetheless on the mercy of others as a result of it wanted to fetch information from banks and card issuance companies. “To solve this, we decided to build our own card infrastructure. We want to be the issuer of cards, collect data directly, and then make credit decisions based on that. You see, we have built a financial ecosystem for business,” stated Enenwali.
The technique and roadmap could have modified, the corporate’s CEO maintained that the aim hasn’t modified. Allawee needs to construct a well-rounded credit score facility for enterprise and is at present building the peripherals, which may stand as merchandise on their very own, that may make the ability formidable. Today, whereas this mannequin is fairly prevalent in retail fintech, Allawee appears to be the one startup enjoying this path for businesses. B2B neobanks like Brass and newly launched Kuda Business, which appears to be providing every little thing Allawee affords, aren’t issuing playing cards for businesses nor do they provide sturdy expense administration instruments.
To construct an ecosystem, a firm should have gathered momentum or be main a specific vertical it could possibly leverage to bundle extra. Allawee seems to be utilizing its card issuing & funds infrastructure to create a moat that may carry the ecosystem it is building. Considering that the worldwide expense administration market is projected to develop from $6.51 billion in 2022 to $12.05 billion by 2029, at a CAGR of 9.2% within the forecast interval, this looks as if a robust vertical to construct on. According to the CEO, the corporate has skilled fast development since launching “with hundreds of businesses signing up and over half a million dollars of payments volume already.”
Last yr, the corporate raised a pre-seed led by Voltron Capital with participation from ODX, a fund by On Deck Co-CEO, Erik Torenburg and Founding Partner, Shawn Xu. RaliCap and Piggy Tech additionally co-invested. Enenwali advised TechCabal that the following factor for the enterprise is to give attention to expense administration and card issuance infrastructure as it’ll lay the precise basis they should construct a full-on financial ecosystem.
…. to be continued
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