Without further ado, I'd like to start by asking you to tell us a bit about yourself and your career trajectory so far.
Thank you for having me on this program. So myself, I am a software engineer by background. I started my career at a bunch of companies like PayPal, Bank of South Africa, GTBank, Access Bank, Sterling Bank, Google before starting Flutterwave in 2016. I started a company that was acquired by a bank as well prior to Flutterwave. That has been my story. I've always been in the technology and finance space. I believe very strongly in helping Africa leapfrog, and that's just been my story so far.
Exciting news. Okay. So can you tell us a bit of the backstory about how you founded Flutterwave and how it's been at the helm of affairs ever since? It's almost 10 years, actually eight years more or less from what you said. So I'm sure it's been quite an interesting ride. Can you just give us the highlights?
It's been eight going on 10. Probably eight going on 20 if you ask my team as well. People like Wendy have been here for, in their mind, like 15 years plus because of how much work this takes. So we started because of the goal to build a shared prosperity for Africans when it comes to payment. There are three main areas we think about when we think about Africa leapfrogging, and if you draw parallels to the rest of the world, for example China, the West, you know, it's the same thing: payments, commerce, and logistics. Those three things are heavily, heavily important to the growth of any 21st-century economy. Now in Africa, we've always done trade before. We've done commerce, we've done logistics, and we've done payments. But in the digital age, we haven't done it well, right? Obviously, there are founders who have laid a very amazing foundation for the work we did. Case in point, Interswitch and the rest of them. So we basically built upon that foundation and thought about how do we complement banks? How do we complement Interswitch? How do we complement these companies and grow and build a bigger infrastructure that can be a base for new people to also build? That's been the goal of Flutterwave. So we started in 2016. I didn't start it alone. I started the company, brought on two co-founders to join me, both amazing gentlemen who joined me in building this company from scratch. Beyond those two, obviously my team also joined at some point and we started building the company. Our goal was obviously how do you first connect Africa together? What are the primary markets in Africa? How do we go there and get licenses? What are the right bank partners to work with? Banks like Access Bank, Ecobank, Zenith Bank, Stanbic IBTC, UBA, Standard Bank are some of the banks that have shaped our journey to where we are today as a company, and they've invested in us via support and infrastructure. Beyond that as well, Flutterwave is a very lucky organization that we've gotten the best people to work for the company. I have an amazing suite, my CFO, my CTO, you know, we have amazing people in the company who are obviously very, very talented, best of the best you can imagine who work for Flutterwave today. Over the last eight years, it's been a long journey, a journey of perseverance, a journey of resilience, a journey of constantly never giving up, a journey where you keep thinking about the value we're creating for Africa and for our stakeholders as well. And so the story we're rewriting for Africa is also very, very important. That's the journey it has been. Yeah, so it's been a lot of work trying to build the infrastructure, but I think we are where we are today where we are the best in class for enterprise payments in Africa. If you are paying a merchant in Nigeria, in Kenya, South Africa, Flutterwave is the best to use. If you are sending money as a remittance customer from anywhere in the US, UK, Canada into Africa, again, it's Flutterwave, right? So that is how we are as a company. That's where we are right now and that is what we've done so far. Yes.
Okay. Great stuff. Thank you. Thanks for that overview. Okay. So now going into the interview proper. I conducted my PhD on the fintech industry. I studied about 100 fintech companies and were able to distill three major things that successful fintech companies do that ensure their longevity. So the first is a razor focus on customer needs, almost like a customer obsession. So I'd like to find out your perspective of how Flutterwave tailors its marketing efforts and its storytelling to its customers. So firstly, how does Flutterwave ensure that its marketing efforts are resonating with its target audience? And can you share a recent campaign that successfully connected with your customers?
Sorry, I lost your voice. Can you repeat that?
Okay. So I said we're looking at how customer-centric... I was able to identify from my research that successful fintech companies are very customer-centric. They're customer-obsessed. So I was wondering how, in terms of your marketing efforts, how does Flutterwave ensure that its marketing efforts are resonating with its target audience? And if you want to share a recent campaign that successfully connected with your customers, that would also be great.
Right. So we are always obviously very customer-focused as a company. When it comes to enterprise customers, if you conduct a survey with enterprise customers today, they will tell you that they've been able to grow with Flutterwave. When it comes to campaigns that we've done successfully that resonated with customers, I would say our trust campaign comes to mind, right, where we basically help enterprise customers to understand that their customers can trust them better if they use Flutterwave for their payments. That's a very big one that I think we've done recently. We partnered with the EFCC Nigeria to contribute to their efforts to build a state-of-the-art cybersecurity research center, which we think is how we can help fight cybercrime and enhance security of digital business transactions in Nigeria as well. So we're constantly always thinking about how do we help customers to succeed. We rely on so many methods depending on the stakeholder we're referring to. If you're talking about enterprise customers today, we talk to them via obviously their suite, their CFOs, helping them to see how we can become better. When we go into the SMB and the local corporate space, a point will be how, for example, we launched from Nigeria to London on Flutterwave. An example of how we enable our customers to focus on their core business while they trust us with what they need to do to be able to scale that business. Right? We did a bit of market research to understand how are the trends trending, how our customer is also evolving, because sometimes it could be a customer well in Q1, in Q4 they're in a totally different business, right? How do we ensure we keep on partnering with them for support?
Excellent. Okay, so you actually answered my next question, which was what strategies you use to understand your customers' needs and preferences. But you've rightly pointed out that you try to keep your pulse on where customers are and you incorporate these insights into your marketing approach. So looking at, as they say, what gets measured is what gets done. So how do you measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, your customer-centric marketing efforts? And I don't know if you can speak to some metrics that you use to evaluate success.
One of the metrics is share of wallet, right? When a customer decides to launch in a new market, are they choosing us or somebody else? Another one is obviously surveys, market research, measuring skill sets for customer satisfaction, you know, ensuring how do we get them to give us more volumes or how do they grow their business because they are flowing. If their growth does not change, then we have to think about what do we need to do to help them have more customer-centric solutions to help their customers to grow. That is how we measure that in a thought way.
Okay. All right. So you mentioned that you focus mainly on enterprise payments. So that's more of B2B, right? So how...
Enterprise and remittances, which is C2C. Yes.
Okay. Okay. All right. So in terms of engaging that demographic, what are the channels you use to get them on board? And how do you use storytelling? How do you use storytelling and other marketing techniques to address their customer pain points?
So one of the things that we do to know our customer pain points is very deep insight, having the right team. Let me call out my marketing team. You know, both storytelling, branding, performance marketing teams, they are world class, right? They've been able to build the right strategies, the right tooling, and the right systems that ensure that we're able to do that effectively, right? What they've used today has been micro-targeting strategies. They've used also from a macro perspective, looking at how can they ensure that that particular customer base is able to understand what we're offering them and we're adding value as well to the entire business.
Okay. All right. Thank you. Thanks so much. Okay. So now let's look at the second section of the interview that talks about stakeholder engagement. You've already used the EFCC example to mention one of the key stakeholders that you collaborated with in delivering your value proposition. So I don't know if you can share, just tell us how Flutterwave approaches building relationships with other firms, communities, and stakeholders. And if you want to call out another successful partnership or collaboration, that would be nice as well.
