Happy New year!
We are excited for what promises to be an exciting 2019; our team is expanding, we are experiencing a spike in the growth of our self transacting customers, and we are implementing strategies towards our expansion plans. Every single day is drawing us closer to providing one billion people access and use of their money.
Before we crush 2019, we want to reflect on 2018, which we consider our transition year — a look back at what we achieved and what set us up for the year ahead
Milestones:
Our Customers:
We started the year with 7 million+ users and by the end of the year, we gained 4 million new customers which took our total to 11 million+ users. Interestingly, we recorded our fastest growth by a million users — it took us only 37 days to grow from 10 — 11 million users!
Our Agents:
Every year, we continue to scale what is now the largest shared agent network distribution point in Nigeria. We grew from 13k agents at the beginning of the year to 19k agents by the end of the year.
The Money:
We processed our first ~1 trillion Naira worth of transactions since the commercial launch of the Paga in 2012.
We raised $10 million in a series B2 investment round — This funding is meant to accelerate our growth in Nigeria and enable us to scale to other countries [Ethiopia, Mexico and the Philippines] where the problem we are solving also exists. The investment round was led by Global Innovation Fund and other participating investors, including; Goodwell, Adlevo Capital, Omidyar Network and Unreasonable capital.
The Moments:
We clocked our 9th year of making life possible for Nigerians — Paga was founded by our CEO; Tayo Oviosu in April 2009 with a simple mission of providing simple ways to send & receive money and access financial services.
This means that this year we will be turning 10 — and we are super excited for our plans for that!
Our Products:
In August, we created a simple solution for transfers with the launch of our new FREE Money Transfer App. The app allows you to send money to any email address or phone number absolutely free. Our app is so awesome, TechNext.Ng listed the Paga app among the top 5 releases of 2018 in Nigeria.
In 2018, we partnered with Mall for Africa via Orange Mall to be an exclusive payment provider on the e-commerce solution to simplify global shopping from over 250 international retailers.
Awards & Recognition:
NIBBS — Nigeria Inter-bank Settlement System named Paga as the top transacting mobile money operator on its system.
We were recognized at the Africa Fintech Summit which held in Washington DC as the “Most Innovative Fintech Company in Africa”.
We joined over 50 Global Fintech Investors as founding signatories to the new “Guidelines For Responsible Digital Financial Services” at the conference in Amsterdam.
For the second year in a row, CB Insights named Paga to the annual FinTech 250 list as part of emerging private companies working on groundbreaking financial technology globally.
Our Founder, Tayo Oviosu and Co-Founder, Jay Alabraba were selected among 25 high-impact founders into the 84th cohort of Endeavour Entrepreneurs.
Our Sponsorships & Partnerships
We joined the organizers of Africa FinTech Summit in putting together its maiden event in Lagos. Our CEO & Founder, Tayo Oviosu gave a keynote speech about “What’s Next For FinTech In Africa”.
Championing education which we are passionate about, we sponsored CodeLagos, an initiative by the Lagos State Ministry of Education (which..?) — There was a competition at the event where we presented all the finalists with 3 brand new laptops.
Tech Crunch Battlefield Africa brought the biggest tech event of the year to Lagos and there was no bigger opportunity to be one of the major sponsors! This was a unique gathering of tech enthusiasts and professionals in the tech ecosystem —developers, founders, startups, journalist, and influencers.
Our brand mantra is Making Life Possible, and so one of our proudest moments was collaborating with the KHAN Foundation; a non-profit organization whose aim is to promote community development and educate kids in underserved communities. What started as a one-time donation ended with us deciding to develop the school in a series of activities within the community where we operate in Yaba — our team helped in setting up classrooms with learning materials and organized a park visit to spend time with the kids.
Our Team:
We started the year with 200 employees and we are proud to have grown to over 250+ young, passionate and vibrant individuals across our offices in Nigeria. Addition to this number is a team of 20+ engineers working in Ethiopia fully dedicated to the technical side of the aspect of the platform.
However, we identified a need for our engineers to interact directly with our product and users, so we began building out our local engineering team, and now have 3 new engineers at our base, and we hope to significantly scale that team through the year.
We’re incredibly excited for what’s to come this year for our users — This is the year where we want to prioritize our customer experience [CX] more than ever; as we continue to drive the adoption of the Paga wallet, creating new use-cases and the roll out new products/features, we want our users to have the best experience at every touch point of interaction with Paga.
We want the Paga Experience to be the best in Nigeria!
We will also love to hear from you throughout the year so whenever you think of those brilliant ideas you will love us to take on, do send us an email here — ideas [at] mypaga [dot] com ;)
Cheers to a wonderful 2019!
Thank you!
