Startup Story

Meghan McCormick is the Co-founder & ceo of OZÉ, a fintech company in Ghana that equips African entrepreneurs to make data-driven decisions to both improve their business performance and access capital. Meghan started her work as a Community Economic Development Volunteer in the Peace Corps in Guinea. During her service, she founded Guinea’s first business accelerator, Dare to Innovate, and scaled it to be French-speaking Africa’s most active small business accelerator. Meghan previously worked as an Innovation Strategist at Monitor Deloitte. She has an MBA from MIT and an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School.

LoA learned more about Meghan McCormick’s inspirational entrepreneurial journey to date and her ambitions for her growing fintech business.

What does your company do?

OZÉ helps small business owners and entrepreneurs to form the habit of financial record keeping. It is an app that makes it easy for businesses to track sales, expenses, and customer information. The data is analyzed to provide tailored recommendations, reports, and business education. If the entrepreneur needs a little extra support, an OZÉ Coach is just a click away. The most exciting thing is that OZÉ works; 97% of businesses that have used OZÉ for at least 9 months are growing or profitable or both! As an entrepreneur is using OZÉ to manage their business and learn how to run it better, we are learning about them. Combining this data with their banking or mobile money history and using a machine learning model, we can predict their credit risk and provide them with affordable capital from our banking partners. Together with banks, OZÉ can formalize and digitize the records of millions of MSMEs and close Africa’s $331B MSME credit gap.
P.S. Our basic version is free to use, so please check it out the Google Play Store or Apple App Store and let me know your feedback.

“OZÉ helps small business owners and entrepreneurs to form the habit of financial record keeping. It is an app that makes it easy for businesses to track sales, expenses, and customer information.”

What inspired you to start your company?

I started a non-profit business accelerator, Dare to Innovate, in the Republic of Guinea. In this work, I was travelling all over the country, rolling up my sleeves, and supporting the work of formerly unemployed youth who were starting businesses. They, like most entrepreneurs in Africa, were keeping their records in notebooks. They didn’t know how to turn the data they were collecting into good business decisions. And even if they did, the process of using handwritten data to understand business performance was so time consuming that it was only an occasional exercise. This problem was compounded by the fact that banks wouldn’t consider their notebooks to be a proper financial record and so they were cut off from formal and affordable channels of business financing. All of this was leading to high rates of business failure and low rates of job creation. I started OZÉ to provide business owners with the tools, information, and capital that they need to thrive.

Why should anyone use your service or product?

OZÉ is more than an accounting platform; it is a community of entrepreneurs serious about growing their businesses. OZÉ entrepreneurs even describe managing their business finances through OZÉ as fun. We connect our entrepreneurs with OZÉ business coaches and with each other. Additionally, OZÉ is the only platform that helps your business perform better and connects you to capital to accelerate that growth.

“I started OZÉ to provide business owners with the tools, information, and capital that they need to thrive.”

Tell us a little about your team

My Co-founder, Dave, and I both served as Peace Corps Volunteers in West Africa. He led the expansion of Dare to Innovate into Benin and then became the CFO of the global organization. Tite, our head of Data and Analytics has a PhD in Economics from MIT. He builds models that allow OZÉ entrepreneurs to borrow capital affordably. Lyke is leading our expansion into Nigeria and is supported by Paul who makes sure that entrepreneurs all over West Africa know about how OZÉ can help them grow. The management team is supported by developers, designers, business coaches, business development associates, and activators who make sure that the app is easy to use, works flawlessly, and leads to business growth.

Share a little about your entrepreneurial journey. And do you come from an entrepreneurial background?

Both my parents are small business owners and my siblings all work for/run start-ups so I think that entrepreneurship must have been in the water growing up. I’ve been a social entrepreneur for as long as I can remember. I founded my first social enterprise at age 10. Even when I was employed in the Peace Corps, I founded a social enterprise that I ended up scaling. What was new (and scary and exciting) about founding OZÉ was that it was my first experience working in tech. I set out to solve the problem of youth unemployment and my journey led me to creating a technology-based solution. It was never my intention. For the first time in my life, I was managing people doing a job that I didn’t have the slightest clue how to do. Honestly, I’m still figuring it out but now with the help of people who know what they are doing. For example, before we hired a full-time designer, I spent hours watching YouTube videos on how to use design software to create products. Everyday I’m failing forward, learning more, and pushing myself and my team to build a product that transforms what it means to run a small business in Ghana, Nigeria, and beyond.

What are your future plans and aspirations for your company?

The problem that I am trying to solve with my career is the catastrophic level of youth unemployment in Africa and around the world. Every year 11 million African youth join the job market and 2 out of 3 are unemployed or underemployed. It’s not fair to themselves or to our world to waste the talent and energy of youth. I believe one of the major contributing factors is the fact that +90% of small businesses in Africa are run by solo-preneurs who don’t create employment. That’s what we are specifically trying to solve at OZÉ. How can we reliably help entrepreneurs grow their businesses so that they create jobs and wealth. To achieve this, I am working so that OZÉ becomes the leading small-business management platform in Africa and that if an entrepreneur uses OZÉ and joins our community they will be more likely than not to succeed.

“OZÉ is more than an accounting platform; it is a community of entrepreneurs serious about growing their businesses.”

What gives you the most satisfaction being an entrepreneur?

Time is our most precious asset and I get to wake up every morning and put my time towards solving big problems that I care about. As my team and I work towards solving long-term systemic problems, I get the joy of individual entrepreneurs sharing the small wins-- how an OZÉ loan saved their business from bankruptcy during COVID or how since they started using the app, they’ve started feeling like a more confident business owner, and so much more.

What's the biggest piece of advice you can give to other women looking to start-up?

If you can imagine yourself doing anything else, do it. If building your company and solving the problems your company is setting out to solve is not your calling, your vocation, and the only thing you can think about doing every day, you might want to save yourself from the pain. If it is the only thing, you can imagine yourself doing, then be bold and take the leap.

Contact or follow OZÉ

Why LoA loves it…

We all know that job creation is one of the major challenges on the African continent and it requires ‘out of the box’ thinking to find innovative solutions to the challenge. Meghan McCormick is one of the women entrepreneurs creating such solutions, and her business and app are empowering and assisting small business owners to grow their businesses so that they create jobs and wealth. It is always exciting to see how technology and innovative thinking is being harnessed to create opportunities for a new generation of startups in Africa to really grow and thrive. — Melanie Hawken, founder & ceo, Lionesses of Africa