In June this year, Flutterwave one of Africa’s most-valued privately held fintech, announced a similar plan after it acquired a payment service provider (PSP) licence in Rwanda.

Nala Money, which allows residents in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States to send money to 9 African countries, recently acquired a licence from Rwanda’s apex financial regulator, the National Bank of Rwanda. The licence will allow the company to cut out middlemen and offer cheaper international money transfers, Nicolai Eddy, chief operating officer of Nala told TechCabal. “It means we can aggregate the payment channels ourselves,” Eddy said, “We want to go deeper and a PSP licence also means that we can process remittance payments for third-party providers and  integrate with local banks and telcos.” 

A PSP licence in Rwanda means NALA can offer money transfer services through established players like Western Union, potentially opening up a new distribution and customer acquisition front for the business. Previously a fintech like NALA would have to rely on payment aggregators like Cellulant, DPO Payment or Onafriq (previously MFS Africa) in order to disburse payments to its customers in Rwanda. Per the World Bank, remittances as a percentage of GDP reached 3.6% ($474 million) in 2022. Altogether, Kenya Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda received roughly $6.36 billion in remittances last year, World Bank data shows.

Rwanda hopes to become a leading hub for financial services firms. The 2022–2027 fintech plan of Rwanda’s ICT Ministry says it hopes to build, “the narrative that Rwanda is the gateway for entering the African fintech market.” Some of the continent’s biggest fintechs already operate in the country with ChipperCash and Paystack being the most recent entrants.

Despite the international remittance market being over-saturated with players, including traditional financial institutions and other fintechs, the process of sending money to African countries is cumbersome and challenging. According to World Bank data, the average cost of sending money to African countries from European countries like Italy, France, and Germany hovers between 3% and 7% and could take up to 2 days depending on the platform. 

Money sent from these European countries to Africa is a significant contributor to the GDP of African countries. In Kenya, remittances contribute up to 3% of the GDP, while in Nigeria and Egypt, that figure climbs up to 6% and 6.7%, respectively. This demand has led to an increase in the total value of money sent to Africa from overseas despite the global economic downturn. According to the World Bank, remittances to sub-Saharan Africa have increased by 5.2% in 2022.

Regarding the reason behind the expansion, Benjamin Fernandes, the founder and CEO of NALA, said, “The European economy is the third largest in the world and home to more than a quarter of African migrants. At NALA, our mission is to financially empower Africans across the world.” 

On how NALA separates itself from the pack, he added, “Payment companies have traditionally leaned on market expansion as a primary growth lever, causing them to pursue wider geographic reach rather than an added value to their product. At NALA, we are laser-focused on building the payments company that Africans deserve.”

Over 11 million African migrants live in Europe, meaning NALA’s expansion has the potential for significant impact by providing more options to send money from Europe to Africa. This expansion follows several other additions to NALA’s product, as the fintech recently integrated ApplePay and Google Pay into its offerings to allow payments from the US and UK to Africa. NALA’s expansion follows in the footsteps of Nigerian Bluechip Technologies, after the software company expanded into Europe earlier this year.

Following NALA’s integration of Apple Pay into its product last week, this addition of Google Pay expands the payout options for NALA’s customers in the diaspora, enabling them to choose either of the global payment services and transfer money to Africa in a blink.

In the United States alone, Google Pay and Apple Pay have about 70 million users combined, making them the go-to payment options in the country. This trend is mirrored in the UK payments scene. As such, NALA is drawing inspiration from the existing payment behaviours of its target users—the African diaspora in the UK and US—to develop its product. 

Google Pay enables safe, seamless, and contactless payments for users, using near-field communication (NFC) technology to facilitate transfers for retailers in physical stores. Users can also save their card details in Google Wallet and make online or in-app payments through the service. Google Pay is presently available across 42 countries to users with Android phones, tablets, or smartwatches. And with this integration, NALA joins African fintech unicorn, Flutterwave, as a payment enabler through Google Pay.

NALA’s integration with Google Pay comes seven months after the startup launched operations in the US with an event held in New York, attended by six members of the Tanzanian parliament. 

Speaking on the Google Pay integration, Benjamin Fernandes, NALA’s founder and CEO, said that NALA’s moves are geared towards connecting Africa with more global payment options while building a rich financial infrastructure for Africans.

“NALA’s mission is to increase economic opportunities for Africans globally; enabling Google Pay is a step towards connecting more global payment options with Africa. This reach allows us to build stronger financial infrastructure for Africans worldwide,” he said in a statement shared with TechCabal.

NALA’s customers in the US and UK can access the Google Pay feature on the NALA app, which enables payout to over 300 banks and 20 mobile money operators in Africa. The Google-Pay-enabled remittances can be received in 5 African countries: Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Ghana. Nala also enables customers sending to Kenya to do more than remittances; they can also pay local bills directly through M-PESA’s PayBill feature.

This newest integration with world payment service, Apple Pay, reaffirms NALA’s ambition to enable seamless and “lightning-fast payments” to Africa. Apple Pay is an advanced mobile payment service developed by Apple Inc that digitises card payments and is optimised for contactless in-store payments. With over 45 million users in the US alone, the payment service is a go-to for many people in countries like the US and UK, which are countries where NALA’s users are. 

NALA’s integration with Apple Pay comes seven months after the African fintech launched operations in the US with an event held in New York, attended by six members of the Tanzanian parliament. 

Speaking on the latest integration, Benjamin Fernandes, NALA’s founder and CEO, said that NALA’s moves are geared towards connecting Africa with global payment options while building a rich financial infrastructure for Africans.

“NALA’s mission is to increase economic opportunities for Africans globally, enabling Apple Pay is a step towards connecting more global payment options with Africa. This reach allows us to build stronger financial infrastructure for Africans worldwide,” he said in a statement shared with TechCabal.

NALA’s customers in the US and UK can access the Apple Pay feature on the NALA app, which enables payout to over 300 banks and 20 mobile money players in Africa. 

To date, only a handful of African fintechs, including Nigeria’s Paystack and South Africa’s Peach Payments, have been able to integrate Apple Pay into their products. Flutterwave, the Nigerian fintech unicorn, promised in February that it would integrate Apple pay into its suite of payment options. But that feature is yet to be rolled out. 

With its product roadmap accessible to all, NALA is keen on improving how Africans, both at home and in the diaspora, experience financial technology services. At its core, the company is empowering people with control over their finances and powering a seamless and transparent experience while at it.

Launched by Benjamin Fernandes in 2018, NALA started as a personal finance app to help Tanzanians and Ugandans to manage their finances. In 2021, Fernandes and his team expanded NALA’s vision and built a money transfer app for Africans in the diaspora who need to send money to their friends and families back home. 

With this remittance solution, NALA was playing in an increasingly saturated market with fintech players like Wise, Remitly, and SendSprint. However, while most local and global remittance players enable international transfers, their users cannot make local payments from their locations abroad, resulting in a business model that denies users substantial control over spending. The diaspora senders didn’t have the flexibility and full control over the remittances they made to Africa.

It’s one thing for an African living abroad to send money home, but it’s a different experience when the sender can pay a family member’s tuition in their local currency. A desire to create experiences like the latter for Africans brought Fernandes and the NALA team back to the drawing board. Now, they have pioneered an affordable and innovative solution allowing Kenyans to make these kinds of payments directly. 

The decision to launch this product in Kenya follows NALA’s increasing footprints in the East African country. Earlier in July, NALA partnered with Equity Bank, a long-standing commercial bank in the country, to facilitate remittances from the Kenyan diaspora in the US and UK. Following this, the fintech startup opened a Nairobi office which currently serves as its operational base. Having established a strong presence in other markets like Tanzania and Uganda, NALA is steadily growing a fintech dominance in the East African market. 

In a chat with TechCabal, Fernandes explained why NALA is building its solutions around two major countries: UK and US.

“We [at NALA] have focused on the US and the UK because these countries have the largest East African populations outside of Africa. However, studies have shown that the majority of money sent to Africa is still sent in cash even in 2022. We believe that digitisation and giving senders more control over their money can change this narrative.” 

While NALA’s latest integration may be uncommon in Africa, Fernandes is not new to disrupting mobile money payments. He grew up watching how mobile money payments transformed the world around him (Tanzania has a mobile money market of over 26 million active users) and has since nursed a desire to contribute to such transformation. To his credit, one of Africa’s earliest integrations for mobile money payments for TV subscription services, built about ten years ago, had Fernandes on the team. 

Like Tanzania, Kenya is another market with an immense mobile money penetration. Statista puts it at over 68 million registered mobile money accounts. M-PESA, the government-owned market leader, operates a PayBill service that allows organisations and individuals to receive payments. This integration by the NALA team allows its customers abroad to safely and securely send money directly to the Pay Bill or Lipa na Mpesa number.

In a statement shared with TechCabal, Fernandes maintained that this latest integration is part of NALA’s mission to enable the Kenyan diaspora to invest in the country efficiently. 

“NALA’s mission is to increase economic opportunities for Africans globally. We believe giving people more transparency and control enables the diaspora to save money and invest efficiently back in Kenya. This reach allows us to build stronger financial infrastructure for Kenyans worldwide,” he said 

According to the World Bank, the average transfer fee to Africa is estimated at nine percent (resulting in transfer fees of up $3.3 billion from the $48 billion sent to sub-Saharan Africa last year). In addition, several remittance alternatives are often riddled with hidden costs that make it difficult to ascertain the true cost of sending money to Africa. NALA promises low and transparent transfer costs to its users. 

With a product roadmap accessible to all, NALA is keen on changing how Africans, both at home and abroad, experience financial technology services. At its core, the company is empowering people with control over their finances and providing a seamless and transparent experience while at it. After Kenya, NALA will launch the pay bill feature in Tanzania, followed by a rollout in other mobile money markets they operate in.