Afrigather One of many greatest operational challenges companies face is managing bills. It’s largely finished manually therefore its complication, particularly when monitoring and recording. For example, it’s a standard follow in Nigeria for employers to demand that workers maintain receipts of bills incurred and current them to be reimbursed. Which means workers should 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 troublesome to substantiate the validity of the declare.
That is the issue Allawee, a Nigerian fintech headquartered in San Francisco, is fixing with its all-in-one monetary platform. The startup has constructed a collection of economic software program and {hardware} that takes away the trouble 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’re constructing a monetary management platform for companies,” Enenwali advised TechCabal over a Google Meet name.
The platform offers management to founders, accountants, managers or anyone with a delegated authority to deal with the enterprise account. Allawee, by way of its partnership with Providus financial institution, offers a enterprise present account to its customers. Customers can load their account with cash and create naira or greenback playing cards or each to spend cash bodily wherever in Nigeria or nearly on-line. Companies can create an infinite variety of playing cards, relying on the variety of workers they intend to offer. As soon as 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 example, a enterprise proprietor can select to price range for a mission to be undertaken by a specific worker, and create a brand new card for the mission or load up an present card utilized by the staff. The proprietor may arrange totally different controls like each day spend, or markup a spend for a specific exercise like meals or fueling of autos. Enenwali stated that companies may even set controls on the precise filling station to purchase gas and the precise place to eat. Which means the cardboard is not going to work outdoors of the preset controls.
On the level of reporting, all enterprise homeowners must do is to extract the small print and export them into no matter third get together platform they need. “This protects time and removes doubts when recording bills,” Enenwali added.
Constructing a monetary ecosystem
Allawee is barely two years outdated and has pivoted twice. The unique concept that birthed the corporate was to resolve lack of credit score and capital for small companies on the continent. So it launched as a bank card lender, however alongside the road, it grew to become obvious that the corporate’s danger evaluation wasn’t sturdy as a result of they weren’t aware about buyer’s credit score data. “The precise credit score danger knowledge was an issue in Nigeria, there was not sufficient knowledge for us to determine who was borrower and who was not. So we determined to construct our personal credit score danger 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, clients had been capable of obtain studies throughout the three main credit score bureaus—CRC Bureau Credit score Restricted, CR Providers Credit score Bureau PLC, and First Central Credit score Bureau Restricted. However 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 knowledge from banks and card issuance companies. “To unravel this, we determined to construct our personal card infrastructure. We wish to be the issuer of playing cards, acquire knowledge immediately, after which make credit score selections primarily based on that. You see, we’ve constructed a monetary ecosystem for enterprise,” stated Enenwali.
The technique and roadmap might have modified, the corporate’s CEO maintained that the aim hasn’t modified. Allawee desires to construct a well-rounded credit score facility for enterprise and is at present constructing the peripherals, which may stand as merchandise on their very own, that may make the power formidable. Right this moment, whereas this mannequin is kind of prevalent in retail fintech, Allawee appears to be the one startup enjoying this course for companies. B2B neobanks like Brass and newly launched Kuda Enterprise, which appears to be providing every thing Allawee affords, aren’t issuing playing cards for companies nor do they provide strong expense administration instruments.
To construct an ecosystem, an organization should have gathered momentum or be main a specific vertical it will probably leverage to bundle extra. Allawee seems to be utilizing its card issuing & funds infrastructure to create a moat that may carry the ecosystem it’s constructing. Contemplating that the worldwide expense administration market is projected to grow 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 powerful vertical to construct on. In response to the CEO, the corporate has skilled speedy development since launching “with lots of of companies signing up and over half 1,000,000 {dollars} of funds quantity already.”
Final 12 months, 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 Associate, Shawn Xu. RaliCap and Piggy Tech additionally co-invested. Enenwali advised TechCabal that the subsequent factor for the enterprise is to concentrate on expense administration and card issuance infrastructure as it should lay the precise basis they should construct a full-on monetary ecosystem.
