This archive report was first published on 11 December 2019.
Published on December 11, 2019, Wayapay, a Kenyan-based fintech start-up, has made history by being the only firm from Africa selected for the inaugural IBM Hyper Protect Accelerator project, hosted in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA.
Wayapay offers a platform to transfer money from all over the world to East and Sub-Saharan Africa through mobile money wallets, bank accounts, and into Wayapay wallets. According to Maroria Hempstone, the Co-founder and CEO of the start-up, Wayapay is a money remittance service that solves the stressful and expensive problem of sending money to Sub-Saharan Africa from other parts of the world.
“Currently, money can take days if not weeks to reach the recipient. This is often stressful as it means enduring long queues and hundreds of dollars in transaction fees for the sender,” Maroria explained.
However, through Wayapay's service, the money can be sent securely, through the web and mobile phone applications, and received via mobile money. “Because of globalization, remittances have increased worldwide. Diaspora remittances into Sub-Saharan Africa in 2018 stood at $49 billion, while diaspora remittance into Kenya stood at $2.68 billion,” he stated.
Wayapay has been selected for the IBM Hyper Protect Accelerator Powered by IBM Linux ONE alongside 14 other start-ups. The program is designed to build and scale the next generation of fintech and healthtech companies with solutions engineered to keep their sensitive data highly secured.
According to Melissa Sassi, Program manager at IBM, the start-ups were selected from nine countries, including Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, Kenya, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and United States. “The IBM Hyper Protect Accelerator is designed to build and scale the next generation of fintech and healthtech companies with solutions engineered to keep their sensitive data highly secured,” Ms. Sassi posted on the IBM Website.
Among the benefits listed for each of the start-ups are IBM Cloud credits of up to $120,000, which will be used for storage, and mentorship with IBM partners and engineers. The one-week accelerator conference took place in Charlotte, North Carolina, and offered the start-up firms meetings with various investors and companies.
“The start-ups, including Wayapay, will also receive one year business mentorship and technical mentorship will happen over a two-year period,” Ms. Sassi explained. The program also includes access to IBM's network of partners, customers, and stakeholder groups, go-to-market support, and co-marketing collaboration.
Maroria said their participation in the IBM program was a new experience, noting the IBM cloud was going to be helpful ahead of launching the program. “We expect to benefit from its security features, protection of customer data and information,” he stated.
During the conference at Charlotte, the Maroria team is seeking mentors on how to proceed to achieve their vision as a company, investors to fulfill the company's financial obligations, financial institutions to offer umbrella coverage of licensing within the USA and other jurisdictions. “We are also hoping to meet with regulatory experts and companies to help us in compliance and doing background checks of our customers,” Maroria said.
