The startup also won the Audience Favorite award.

The finale was hosted on September 19 during TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, CA where this year’s VEI finalists pitched their payment solution to an esteemed panel of judges.

As a vital component of the program, Visa has made its network available to drive inclusive economic growth with the goal of giving everyone, everywhere, access to the global economy.

Notably, minority-owned businesses have tripled after the pandemic, introducing new ideas for the fintech space.

The 2023 VEI program saw a significant uptick in diverse applicants, with women-led businesses representing nearly half of this year’s entrants.

Last year, ThriveAgric, another Nigerian startup that provides smallholder farmers access to finance, insights, and distribution was crowned the 2022 winner of VEI.

VEI is an open innovation program and competition for start-ups and fintech companies, targeted at solving the payment challenges of tomorrow through innovation.

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As Africa’s largest economy, Nigeria offers substantial growth potential across several sectors. While much of our economic potential has traditionally been based on our status as one of the world’s ten largest exporters of crude oil, the government is keen to diversify by developing other industries.

However, one major hurdle to overcome first, is financial inclusion. By the end of 2020, just 64% of Nigerians were part of the formal financial system – still short of the government’s target of 80%.

The big question remains, how do we bridge this gap? While fintech partnerships are an important route towards improving access to the digital economy, the creation of a favorable ecosystem is also a critical factor, all geared toward establishing optimal conditions for innovation and entrepreneurship.

There is a large body of published literature that offers frameworks outlining the right conditions for innovation, and this is something that Visa strives to enable through its network of global Innovation Centers, offering our partners a space to experiment and build solutions that bring more people and communities into the digital economy.

On digitalization of Nigeria’s economy, the agricultural sector is posed to reap the biggest benefits. In 2021, the sector contributed 25.9% to our real GDP and it employs more than 70% of our population – primarily at a subsistence level.

This is why the government sees the development of agriculture as an important means of employment generation, food security, and poverty reduction.

We saw this in the Agriculture Transformation Agenda 2011-2015, followed by the Agriculture Promotion Policy 2016-2020; two development frameworks that outline specific strategies – doubling the growth rate of the integrated agriculture sector to increase its contribution to the national GDP; reducing food imports to become a net exporter of key agricultural products; and integrating agricultural commodity value chains into the broader supply chains of domestic and foreign industries.

Given the importance of the agricultural sector to Nigeria, ThriveAgric, a start-up focused on digitizing the entire value chain for farmers, is a worthy regional winner of the 2022 Visa Everywhere Initiative (VEI) for the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa (CEMEA) region.

VEI is an innovation program that helps start-ups unlock new opportunities, giving them a global platform to demonstrate their innovation, ideas, and groundbreaking solutions.

Over the seven years since VEI’s launch, nearly 12,000 start-ups have taken part in the initiative, raising a collective $16 billion in funding.

ThriveAgric’s Agricultural Operating System helps map farmer’s lands, onboarding, recording visitations, record valuable harvest data, manage inventory, and monitor the progress of farms in real time. Over the past five years, it has disbursed financing worth more than $70 million to over 240,000 farmers, helping them double their income and triple their output.

Now, as a Visa partner, ThriveAgric will deploy Visa cards to farmers across the continent – speeding up disbursements, offering secured transactions, access to credit scoring, digitized payment flows, among other things.

Visa’s core purpose is to expand access to the digital economy – for both individuals and small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) – because we believe this is the key to driving both inclusive growth and prosperity for everyone, everywhere. ThriveAgric is the perfect partner for driving such growth, bringing individuals and SMBs into the digital economy while supporting the digitalization and development of one of the continent’s most important sectors.

Further development of Nigeria’s healthcare system is also critical for future growth. CarePay, a Nigerian health tech start-up, was selected as another finalist for VEI.

CarePay negotiates, aggregates, and coordinates discounts across hundreds of healthcare merchants to provide healthcare services to both insured and uninsured individuals and households.

During VEI’s CEMEA regional finals, the health tech start-up displayed how its model can drive both customer and brand retention for a range of stakeholders which includes Fintechs, card networks, banks, telcos, and pension funds and those who adopt the CarePay healthcare discount product as loyalty benefits for their customers.

The company’s drive to use digital technology to help consumers access affordable healthcare, when scaled, could result in a significant boom to Nigeria’s economy.

While ThriveAgric and CarePay have digitalized agriculture and healthcare, Lagos-founded Paga aims to boost merchant access to digital payment acceptance – which can help boost financial inclusion.

By March of 2020, when it became a Visa partner, the start-up had created a multi-channel network for more than 14 million customers in Nigeria to transfer money, pay bills, and make digital purchases through its mobile app and 24,840 agents.

Through these mini case studies, we all see why the continued development of ecosystems that foster innovation and entrepreneurship is critical.

Platforms such as VEI will continue to play a role in highlighting the best use cases of digitalization across a range of sectors, helping founders to secure valuable funding to turn their ideas into a reality while providing them access to Visa’s sizeable and global network.

Winners of the Visa Everywhere Initiative will be awarded monetary prizes and the opportunity to partner with a global, trusted brand like Visa.

This year’s program has expanded to include startups that are using cryptocurrency and Visa Direct, a payment solution that can help businesses move money to billions of endpoints worldwide via card and account rails, in innovative ways.

Finalists from across the world that are driving economic growth will converge in Qatar this November for the Visa Everywhere Initiative finals.

“Fintechs and other payments innovators are transforming the way consumers and businesses make payments, making it easier for more people to access the money they need when they need it – and the pandemic has seen this become more critical than ever,” said Kemi Okusanya, Vice President, Visa West Africa.

“Competing on a global stage alongside some of the most prestigious startups in the world and, more importantly, being able to receive that global exposure and support from a trusted brand like Visa was an exceptional achievement for PAYZE,” said Giorgi Tsurtsumia, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of PAYZE as well as 2021 VEI CEMEA Winner. PAYZE is an e-commerce-oriented fintech that enables businesses across CIS countries to accept payments from around the world through a single integration. With the support of Visa’s network and a cash prize of $25,000, the PAYZE team is busy fulfilling their vision, having processed more than 250,000 transactions across 2021.

The competition also saw Karachi-based fintech, Safepay, win the CEMEA Audience Favorite award and $10,000 in prize money. Safepay specializes in secure payment processing for e-commerce stores and helps merchants increase checkout conversions, expedite receivables, and streamline sales by allowing their customers to pay online.

The Visa Everywhere Initiative network includes 8,500 startups from around the world, which continues to grow every year.

Since its launch in 2015, the program has helped startups from over 100 countries collectively raise more than $2.5 billion in funding, addressing one of the biggest challenges faced by early-stage entrepreneurs. Every year, the scope of VEI is expanded to engage with unique startups and solve unique problems in the world of payments.

This year, the program will have a clear focus on Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa (CEMEA), a region with tremendous opportunity for fintechs that are developing innovative products and solutions aimed at supporting the community. The latest edition of VEI sees two new editions in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as well as the global finale in Qatar in November 2022.

Visa Everywhere Initiative is seeking innovative and ambitious entrepreneurs who are uplifting communities by solving payment and commerce challenges faced by businesses of all sizes and sectors, including:

Enablers of digital services and digital issuers

• Blockchain and cryptocurrency
• Crowdfunding
• Banking-as-a-Service
• BIN sponsors
• Issuer/processors
• Program managers

Digital issuance

• Blockchain and cryptocurrency
• Alternative lending
• Personal financial management
• Money transfer and remittance
• Digital banking (aka neo banks)
• Digital wallets, peer-to-peer (P2P) and transfers
• Employee benefits
• Payables
• Corporate cards (aka expense management)

Value-add for merchants and/or consumers in the finance space

• Data and analytics
• ID, authentication and security
• InsurTech
• Loyalty
• Merchant services and tools
• Process and payment infrastructure
• Retail technology
• Other

Small- and medium-sized businesses

• Money movement (disbursements, Intra-account, P2P vendor and payments)
• Acceptance (e-commerce and mobile acceptance)
• Risk management (chargebacks, etc.)
• Brand management (Community building, etc.)
• Other

How to Apply for Visa Everywhere Initiative 2022

Visa does not acquire any equity from Visa Everywhere Initiative competitors as part of this competition.

More information and application details are available here.