Who can relate?
Making payment with your credit card, which has your last cash in it, using a PoS machine, an ATM, or even via transfers, there’s a decline, you get debited, and boom! You’re stranded, there is no immediate reversal and in some cases, no reversal at all.
These, including several other challenges involved in financial transactions, were Jacquelyn Madu’s push toward creating a solution that would tackle all of these.
Jacquelyn Madu is the Founder and CEO of Azapay, a Nigerian Fintech startup making cardless-based transactions possible for individuals and businesses, without fear of being trapped at any point.
In an interview with Joan Aimuengheuwa, Jacquelyn explains the very relatable inspiration behind Azapay, how the platform is making both businesses and customers ecstatic and how it has processed over 200 million in transfer-based transactions in less than three months...Meet Jacquelyn:
Kindly tell us how the journey started for you
With statistics, we can tell that most people who perform transactions usually prefer the online transfer option and it has a higher volume in terms of transactions compared to POS or ATMs.
With that in mind, and seeing how inconvenient it has been for myself as a customer to a normal business or to other people, where they walk into a store trying to perform transactions with their cards, which in some cases gets declined and they have to deal with the issue of trying to recover that money from the bank.
I’ve been a victim of that and I never got my money back from the bank. There are also cases where you get to a store and they tell you; ‘oh sorry, our POS is not available’ and there’s literally no option for them to do a transfer, they have to go and get cash elsewhere.
The idea around Azapay is to come in and be that option for users, where even though you don’t have cash or card, you’re provided with payment options to do a transfer in-store.
Have you been in the finance or startup space before now?
Yes, before now I had another product I was working on and prior to that, I worked with a major bank where I was contracted to build one of their products. So, I’ve played in the Fintech space and one thing I’ve identified with myself is my ability to identify existing problems that nobody sees as a major problem.
So, for me, with Azapay, this is a problem other fintechs try to solve, but with a card-based payment solution and I wondered why they couldn’t just find a way to fix this existing problem card transactions brought about.
Rather than looking at the big names to fix that problem, I took on the challenge to try and fix it, making it a mainstream payment option.
So, let’s delve into Azapay; how would you introduce the fintech to an ordinary user?
We have the application itself which allows the users to perform all their banking needs – send money, receive money, buy airtime or data, pay bills and we are working on new features.
We did beta launch in December last year just to have real users download the application, use it and then give us feedback on what they want us to improve on.
We ran that from the 21st of December, 2021, and stopped onboarding users around mid-January, 2022.
Within that window, we got about 1,860 real active users and with that, we were able to get feedback on our UX and other features they wanted us to have, introduce other features that we had in mind, get to test and see the results.
We’ve had a close user case and we are working on those features, we are going to be rolling them out in a couple of weeks. Each feature will be rolled out each week just so we can give our users a feel that the product itself is growing and getting better.
Azapay features
Now, what is really attractive to our users is the ability to send money to anyone without requesting their account number, all you need is their phone number or email address.
Another key feature of interest to our users is the ability to shop within the application itself from our merchants who display their products on the platform.
There’s also a feature which is the ability for our users to make withdrawals from CashMe Rep locations. Anyone that is cash trapped within an unfamiliar location can just go on the application, click the CashMe Rep button and find an available CashMe Rep around them, the application will lead them to where the Rep is located. It provides the user a level of safety as well.
Also, users are able to save on the application, they are given the opportunity to save within their own banking application which allows them to fulfill all their banking needs, saving and earning interest.
They can save for a purpose and a target, the application advises them on the price range needed to be saved depending on the target and what’s going on in the market.
How do money transfers work on Azapay?
With your phone number, you as a recipient will be alerted that an amount of money has been sent to you.
The amount of money is tied to the phone number and a link is sent to you. Once you receive the message from Azapay, you need to redeem the money by clicking the link, downloading the application, and registering with the exact phone number the money was sent to.
Once this is done, the money drops into your account. This means that the phone number must be the one connected to your account.
What about situations whereby the phone number connected to your account is lost or no longer in use?
Explaining this, Jacq said: If the recipient doesn’t receive the SMS or redeem the money within 48 hours, the sender is notified and the money is reversed.
Expatiating on the inspiration behind Azapay
What made me fully decide to build Azapay was the COVID-19 pandemic. During Covid, I lost my card and of course, there’s always a long queue in the customer service section of banks to get my card back.
In the beginning, everything was fine because a certain bank had this cardless withdrawal option but you had to use their own ATM and the distance was quite far from my location.
Even when I got a friend that had an access card to help, the ATMs were selective and it was frustrating. At that point, I decided to find a solution to all of these. That really was the drive.
What differentiates Azapay from other players in the Fintech field?
There’s no platform that I know of trying to create a cardless system. Other platforms utilize a physical or virtual card for operations, but Azapay is giving you the opportunity to go cardless and travel light, just be you as a person, you are the only person that can make that transaction.
You don’t need an object such as an ATM card or entering into banks to enable you to carry out transactions. Everything you need is put together in one application.
So far, so good
Our key focus is to create a fair payment option available for businesses. Currently, we have five major companies serving as our merchants and they are using the platform.
We launched our merchant platform in beta around the 15th of May, 2022, and to date, we’ve been able to process over 200 million in transfer-based transactions without running ads.
What that has done for us as a business is we rose in beta and we’ve been able to validate our solution, validate the opportunity that currently exists in that market and we are solving an existing problem.
Azapay serves customers spanning diverse industries be it pharmaceutical, hospitality, logistics, agrotech, healthcare and retail and there is always a chain of command in these businesses from the management to the supervisors and the floor staff.
The guys down of command are our true ambassador. When the deployment go out for installation or upgrades they come with emotional stories from these cashiers who no longer have to face the wrath of customers due to failed card transactions.
Unique selling point
With Azapay’s solution, there’s no need to worry about failed transactions, requests for screenshots, or phone numbers, doubting if customers have actually done the transfers they claim to have done.
You can easily verify a transaction without calling your supervisor or reaching out to any other person, you as a cashier can validate a transfer payment right there on the spot, without leaving your post. Your supervisors and other management teams can see all the transactions, giving the business itself transparency to understand what’s going on in their store and how much money is moving.
That’s the unique selling point for Azapay. By solving the problems for the business, we are creating comfort for the customers, transfers can be made anywhere easily, no need for fear of POS decline and the likes.
What we are ultimately creating is for anyone to be able to make transfer payments, so the key there is to walk into a store and make a transfer without any hassle, but the store has to be an Azapay merchant.
What are your cybersecurity strategies to ensure customer data is safe?
Our approach protects our customers’ data, there are certain vital information that we encrypt so even if there’s a situation where someone hacks into our platform, they are unable to get access to sensitive information, which is highly impossible.
For fraud-related issues, our KYC process makes it very hard for us to have occurrences like that, our KYC captures the data of our users.
We have a two-factor verification that protects users’ funds, so without the transaction pin that you created, and which we do not have or store on our end, no one can move money out of your account.
If a user loses the Azatag, can just the email or phone number be used?
To perform transactions with Azapay, you need the Azatag which is your unique identifier. It’s just like your username on Instagram. Within the Azapay ecosystem, your Azatag serves as your account number.
With your Azatag, you’re able to move money from one account to another, request money from your friends and make payments easily even without your mobile phone.
What are the challenges you have encountered so far? How have you been able to curb them?
One of the challenges that we faced is identifying Product-Market fit (PMF) because it’s a new terrain and there’s no other business to emulate or look at their model to build on what they’ve already built, trying to make it better. Some other fintechs looked at other products and made them better, but we had to learn on the job, make our mistakes and grow.
Another challenge was winning the confidence of our merchants. They loved the product and wanted to be a part of it but didn’t want to be the first to be a part of it, they wanted someone else to jump on it first before they came on board.
Eventually, we were able to keep going because giving up was not an option for us, we kept going to figure it out. Identifying Product-Market Fit involved us speaking to businesses and merchants, and doing our research while building our products.
More on Azapay’s products
We have four key products under Azapay: the application itself, the Azapay merchant, CashMe, which works like POS agency banking but it’s not agency banking. We are trying to marry agency banking with cardless withdrawals so we like to call our CashMe Reps human ATM.
If you look at agency banking and you look at the stats with agency banking, about 81% of the transactions they do is cash withdrawals.
Some of them have situations where the POS agent receives a fake alert, though we don’t know how they do it, or in other cases, accounts being deducted of huge amounts of money after making POS payments of little amounts, and going to the banks are of no use.
We are trying to help the business and the user at the same time. We are putting the power in your hands, there’s no third party involved. The CashMe Rep does not need to wait for alerts to confirm transactions, it can be verified from the application itself. With CashMe, withdrawals can also be made easily.
Again, we have the Azapay device. It is more like a POS device. It is a cardless device that enables businesses to verify all transactions. We’ve deployed devices to our merchants including GIG Logistics, Puma, and Lacoste, among others.
Conclusively
We have been able to get our users on board and I genuinely appreciate them for taking that risk with us because some of the merchants were not willing to take the risk but they were willing because they understood that they had a problem and they knew this solution was going to help them. So I want to say a very big thank you.
Download Azapay app on Google Play Store and/or Apple Store.
