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African Payments App NALA Now Live In The EU

January 10, 2023

In order to increase its presence in Europe, NALA, a Tanzanian FinTech startup that enables payments to Africa, has added 19 more EU countries to its list of remittance markets.

NALA has experienced tremendous growth through global expansion and product differentiation since expanding to the UK and USA last year. Six Tanzanian lawmakers attended the company’s US launch event in New York City. The company has released a number of improvements, including the introduction of NALA For Business and recent integrations with Apple and Google Pay, in addition to the EU expansion.

The founder and CEO of NALA is Benjamin Fernandes, a Tanzanian with over ten years of experience in mobile money transfers in Africa. Ten years ago, he created one of the earliest mobile money payment connections for TV subscription businesses.

Fernandes commented, “The European economy is the third largest in the world, and home to more than a quarter of African migrants. At NALA, our mission is to financially empower Africans across the world. Launching in the EU significantly expands our reach and ability to meaningfully innovate in the African payments space.

“Payments companies have traditionally leaned on market expansion as a primary growth lever, causing them to pursue wider geographic reach rather than added value in their product. At NALA, we are laser-focused on building the payments company that Africans deserve. This has led us to dually push forward on product innovation alongside market expansion,” he added.

By offering fair and transparent services to give people control over their resources, NALA is trying to shift the paradigm of financial tools for Africans. On December 15, the majority of the Eurozone’s nations made the app accessible for download through the App Store or Play Store.

As the company expands, NALA now has a few former Google and Monzo employees on their staff who are spearheading and managing the initiatives to scale payments across Africa.

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Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard

Kenya’s Cellulant Partners Tanzanian Fintech NALA for Overseas Payments

April 30, 2022

NALA, a Tanzania based Fintech company, has teamed up with Kenya’s Cellulant, a Pan-African Payments Company, to oversee and allow remittance payments from the United Kingdom and the United States into Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania and Ghana for customers. Besides Official Direct Assistance (ODA), remittances make up the second-largest source of external resources for Sub-Subsaharan Africa, according to Cellulant.

In 2019, approximately $48 billion was remitted in Africa, with Nigeria receiving roughly 50% of this amount, followed by Ghana and Kenya. Despite a decline in remittance inflows in sub-Saharan Africa in 2020 due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, countries such as Kenya and Ghana experienced an increase in cross-border payments. Remittance inflows into Sub-Saharan picked up again and grew roughly by 6% in 2021.

Transaction fees absorb a large percentage of the billions sent to Africa every year. The cost of sending money into Africa is the highest across all regions. Tanzania and Kenya remain the highest with charges at 17% and 21% respectively for every $200 sent. With increased intra-African trade between Africa and the rest of the world, the transaction cost is one of the barriers to success in facilitating cross-border payments.

The new partnership between Cellulant and NALA aims to facilitate seamless cross-border payments and significantly reduce the cost of sending money from the UK and the US into Africa.

“Today, Sub-Saharan Africa is the most expensive region to transfer money into,” NALA’s COO, Nicolai Eddy, said.

“In Tanzania and across the African continent, there is a huge opportunity to harness technology to reduce payment fees and build next-generation payment and banking products. At NALA, we’ve built a completely digital platform for individuals and businesses based in the UK and US to send money to their friends, family, and employees in Africa. Cellulant is one of the early payment pioneers on the continent, and we chose to partner with them because of their deep expertise in the space and their strong technical capabilities.”

Cellulant provides a single API payments platform, Tingg, that enables global, regional and local businesses to collect payments online and offline while allowing anyone to pay from their mobile money, local and international cards or directly from their bank. The platform powers payments for 220 million consumers on a single inclusive network, allowing interoperability across Africa.

“Cellulant solves a huge challenge for businesses coming into Africa since they have to deal with 54-55 different payment providers and multiple currencies, with at least one for each country. With our presence in 35 countries, we are able to cover all these needs through a Single platform, Single API, Single contract, One web tool and a Single point of managing all operations. This partnership complements Nala’s fully digital cross-border payment capabilities with the necessary infrastructure to enable them to deliver their services in the continent effectively,” said David Waithaka, Cellulant’s Chief Revenue Officer.

NALA, a Y-Combinator-backed company, provides an app for Africans living in the United Kingdom and the United States to send money to the continent seamlessly. NALA is currently active in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and Ghana and is preparing to join the Nigerian and Ethiopian markets. The company is looking forward to expanding its services across Africa, the United States, and Canada

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

USA Investors Back Tanzanian Payments Startup NALA In $10m Seed Round

January 28, 2022

NALA, a Tanzanian cross-border payments firm that recently switched from local to international money transfers, announced on Thursday that it had raised $10 million in a fresh round of funding.

“We don’t want to be compared to a regular remittance company, and people will do that naturally. But we think remittance is just the starting point for what we’re going to build,” founder and CEO Benjamin Fernandes said in a statement. “My take is that payments across the continent is 1% built, and there’s a lot of infrastructure and software that needs to be built deeply. That’s where we want to sit and this $10 million round is going to do a lot of that.”

Amplo (USA), Accel, and Bessemer Partners (USA) are among the major investors in this new financing round, which also includes local investors such as DFS Lab. Jonas Templestein, co-founder and CTO of Monzo; Vladimir Tenev, Robinhood co-founder and CEO (USA); Deel founder Alex Bouaziz (USA); Laura Spiekerman, co-founder of Alloy; Peeyush Ranjan, the head of Google Payments; and early employees at Revolut and TransferWise were among the angel investors who contributed to NALA.

NALA will be able to hire more people and support expansion efforts in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe, as well as establish payment rails in Africa and expand into new countries, thanks to the financing.

As a result of the funding, Sheel Tyle, the founder and general partner at Amplo, will join NALA’s board, the company said in a statement.

The seed round follows a seven-figure pre-seed round led by Accel in 2019, roughly three years after NALA received a seven-figure pre-seed round led by Accel.

NALA Payments — *The team at NALA. Image credits: NALA*

Why The Investors Invested

The startup has generated considerable traction since it was founded. Apart from the 250,000 customers NALA has built in East Africa before going international, the company claims that over 8,000 customers have used the NALA platform to shift over eight figures in transaction volume to Africa in the last six months.

Currently, the platform allows payments from the U.K. to Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Ghana.

The startup was also part of Winter 2019 Batch of Y Combinator accelerator programme.

A Look At What The Startup Does

Launched in 2019, the low-hanging fruit of NALA is remittances. NALA, meantime, is privately beta testing multi-currency accounts that will allow the African diaspora to keep local African currencies while overseas, in addition to enabling cross-border transfers from the UK (and the US and the EU) to Africa. It is also now testing NALA for Businesses, which allows people in the diaspora to make payments to Africa through their businesses.

According to Fernandes, the Tanzanian fintech would develop infrastructure to enable money transfers from Africa to the United States and the United Kingdom.

“Our core customer base is the diaspora right now who live in the U.K. This is the customer we’re currently serving today as we speak,” founder and CEO Benjamin Fernandes said. “We also got our license approvals to go live in the U.S. and the E.U., which will be going live in a month and a half in at least one other E.U. country, probably France.”

The company also claimed that NALA is currently present in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Ghana and South Africa, with plans to be live in 12 African countries by the end of the year, including Nigeria.

NALA Payments NALA Payments

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Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer

Tanzanian Fintech Startup Launches International Money Transfer App

January 25, 2021

The need to bypass the high cost of international money transfer by Africans in the diaspora is the drive behind the launching of a new money transfer app in the United Kingdom (UK) by a Tanzanian fintech startup NALA focusing on servicing the needs of the East African diaspora in the United Kingdom. NALA was founded by Benjamin Fernandes.

Nala is a past winner of both Ecobank Fintech Challenge and Seedstars Tanzania and has previously developed a mobile money app for Africa that grew to over 250,000 customers in just over a year and became East Africa’s number one finance app.

NALA, which is backed by Y Combinator and is also US-based VC firm Accel’s first Sub-Saharan African investment, recently gained EMD Agent approval from the UK’s financial regulator the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and plans to launch a money transfer app for East Africans living in the UK in the next few months.

“Our mission is to increase economic opportunity for Africans worldwide and we believe that remittances are one of the best forms of economic development,” NALA said.

“We want to use remittances as a foundation for new layers of banking services for the African diaspora and their loved ones back home.”

The NALA beta app will be rolling out gradually from February 2021 for UK-based customers sending to Kenya and Uganda. It will be available for customers sending to Tanzania shortly after.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry