LIONESS WEEKENDER COVER STORY
Hepta Pay, a fintech business helping dissolve the barriers to cross-border micropayments for members of the East African Diaspora
Victoria Munguti is the co-founder and ceo of Hepta Pay, a financial services company founded in 2020 and based in East Africa. She holds a master's degree in information technology (MSIT) with a focus on Data Science and Entrepreneurship from Carnegie Mellon University. Throughout her career Victoria has worked on different tech projects and entrepreneurial venture programs. She has also co-founded two start-up businesses in the domains of Data Analytics (Hepta Analytics) and Fintech (Hepta Pay) respectively. She has been actively engaged in the tech ecosystem, supporting entrepreneurs at different stages of ideation, startup, and go-to-market strategies, and scaling of successful startups into scale-ups in different countries of Africa.
Lioness Weekender spoke to the change-making Victoria Munguti about her inspiration for starting the business and her vision for the future.
What does your company do?
Hepta Pay is a virtual ATM for mobile money in East Africa that enables customers to deposit mobile money, top-up airtime, or pay bills in Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda and Burundi. Through the company’s easily navigated system, customers can make payments from their debit/credit cards directly to Mobile Money wallets across the East Africa. The solution is particularly remarkable for its ease of use as a customer is not required to sign up on HeptaPay to transact. HeptaPay accepts payment via Visa, Mastercard and American Express debit/credit cards from anywhere in the world. With limited marketing, the Hepta Pay platform has enabled a transaction volume more than $1,000,000 and has reached out to more than a thousand users so far.
What inspired you to start your company?
Seven years ago, I personally experienced the problem of high transfer fees and delays while receiving money from my family across the border. Back then, most local merchants in East Africa did not accept debit/credit card payments. This inspired us to create a solution that would help address this problem, but little did we know that there were many other expatriates and members of the diaspora who faced the same challenge. We managed to solve the problem for ourselves and a few other friends, but we wondered what if we open our platform for other people who want to remit or send money to neighbouring countries. Our solution had lesser cost implications compared to existing remittance platforms even when monetized and commercially made available.
Hepta Pay was then formally incorporated in 2020 to help dissolve the barriers to cross-border money transfers enabling members of the East African Diaspora to send remittances in less than a minute. Businesses use our platform to receive instant digital payments from card-paying customers. Some merchants have expressed their joy on how they are benefiting from our easy-to-use plugin that easily allows them to start receiving digital payments from a wider base of customers increasing their revenues and reach.
What makes your business, service or product special?
What sets us apart is the fact that we are enabling micropayments to flow into East African economies at affordable fees. Normally, micropayments into this region are very expensive, inconvenient, and slow, reducing the ease of trade. Unlike traditional platforms, where you must pay 15% on a $100 payment, we only charge a flat 4% fee regardless of the amount being transacted. Since the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, most countries have been encouraging the use of contactless transactions, and our platform is heavily used due to its convenience and ease of use at the comfort of one's home or office while making online payments.
Tell us a little about your team
We strongly believe that investments begin with people. The Hepta Pay team has the capacity and skills to deliver all our objectives and key results. We are all master's degree holders from Carnegie Mellon University where we all met and pursued different specializations in Data Science with applied machine learning, Cybersecurity and IT entrepreneurship. The team is comprised of two data scientists, one DevOps engineer, a certified cloud security engineer, an admin with a geospatial technologies background, and finally a techpreneur who is also a business strategist. We all are successful founders, and in the past three years, we have built our first version of the web app and we have scaled operations to four East African countries so far. The team knows what solutions are suitable for which markets.
Share a little about your entrepreneurial journey. And, do you come from an entrepreneurial background?
I can say that I come from a house that runs a shop to meet the daily needs of the family. My baby steps in understanding the thought process and skills of running a business come from my humble beginnings. As I was driven ahead by the hunger to succeed, I also started looking out for opportunities that would help me achieve my life goals. I was able to identify my window of opportunity and found a group of like-minded team members who were just as hungry to succeed. Together, we set out to solve a challenge that was a concern for every member of the diaspora. Thus, was born Hepta Pay and you see where we are today. The hunger to succeed and the motivation of the team has helped us in becoming a fintech company that is serving the East African community.
Throughout this journey, I have had mentors who have helped shape some key principles in my life. I would say that as a young entrepreneur, you need to get the best value from these relationships and be keen not to lose your inner self and purpose as a person. All along this journey, there has been a process of attending meetings, entrepreneur events, and conferences while still building our product, which enabled me to grow as a professional while putting the brand Hepta Pay on the global map. I look forward to influencing other young people while creating employment opportunities and doing much more on a bigger scale.
What are your future plans and aspirations for your company?
We envision a completely decentralized platform using the emerging technologies that place control on a distributed network of agents all over the world without a central point of control. The ultimate goal is to reduce transaction cost up to 1% achieving a key Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target that aims at reducing remittance costs to 3% across Africa.
What gives you the most satisfaction being an entrepreneur?
Knowing that you are addressing an actual need in society and seeing African businesses streamline key operations like payments brings satisfaction to my heart. Using our business as a force to do good for the world we live in is something worth waking up for.
What's the biggest piece of advice you can give to other women looking to start-up?
As an entrepreneur, you need perseverance to make it. The best advice I would give to women who would like to start up is that the idea is not always clear at the beginning so don’t be scared to start because as you move up the ladder of entrepreneurship, things start becoming clear.
A dynamic team with a high-energy culture is an essential element to the success of your startup. While building your business, it is important to develop a product/service that can be delivered by other people or technology. The elasticity of your business model will help you grow or shrink with the markets.
You will need to be qualified for the business you are building so advice from people who have done it before is helpful. Good partnerships and connections within your industry will help you. Being able to access cash/funding for business will help accelerate the achievement of objectives and key results. Developing a business that has the potential to return investment quickly while growing significantly is key.
Finally, entrepreneurship will not always be a walk in the park therefore, embracing failure is important and whenever you encounter failure/risks it is important to know these three things: (1) understand why you failed (2) learn and improve from your previous mistakes (3) realize that failure is not the end of the world but only a part of the journey. It is therefore important not to lose hope and focus whenever you encounter tough situations but to carry on with a renewed vigour and improved foresight.
To find out more about Hepta Pay, contact Victoria Munguti via email: vmunguti@heptapay.com or visit the company’s website and social media platforms:
Website: https://heptapay.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heptapay
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HeptaPay
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heptapay/
YouTube or Vimeo Video: https://youtu.be/xEO9gSOOn60
https://youtu.be/sbzRkxtJHd4
