Nigeria’s web and mobile financial services startup SimplePay has announced a partnership with Consumer Bureau de Change to allow for incoming and outgoing remittances through the SimplePay platform. With this partnership, the company said Nigerians in the diaspora can fund the SimplePay accounts of their friends and families from anywhere in the world.
Commenting on the partnership, the chief executive officer (CEO) of SimplePay Simeon Ononobi said the company plans to offer rates that will be competitive with existing incoming remittance options.
“Nobody can compete with us on speed and convenience though,” he said, “when someone sends cash to your SimplePay account, you can use it within seconds for purchases on our platform.”
Explaining the uniqueness of the partnership, Rich Tanksley, Director of Operations at SimplePay said it would SimplePay to compete with Western Union, World Remmit and other major players in the remittance market.
“The incoming remittance market is US$21 billion annually in Nigeria. Fees are highly competitive but we can compete. Here is why: With Western Union you have to go to an agent to get the money. Once you get it, that’s it. They have to make their money on the transfer. With SimplePay, we actually don’t really care about the remittance fee. Once the money is in the SimplePay wallet, we make our money on the small transaction fees we charge when people use the money. All we want is funds into SimplePay wallets,” Tanksley told HumanIPO.
“Our speed is also instant. Nobody can compete with this. I click “send now” and the SimplePay user gets an alert on their phone that they have funds they can instantly use.
“The reason we are better is that we are a Nigerian solution. We have thousands of users in Nigeria that already use our web and mobile wallets to make purchases. This is just another way for them to fund their wallets.”
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