Tell us something about the outset story of your organization. Who were its founders?
Meet Ousmane Conde, the California based Entrepreneur who built a financial technology company to lift 360M unbanked people out of poverty in West Africa. “His company is banking the unbanked, and their world will never be the same again”
Most of us in the U.S. take for granted the ease with which we move money to other parties, schedule bill payments, and buy items online. The least convenient method we know is writing a check and putting it in the mail. This isn’t the case in Western Africa. To put things into context, just imagine spending a day, without access to your bank account and your credit card. Now, imagine 360M unbanked people, living like this every single day. Now you may think that this is a problem specific to West Africa. However, nearly ½ of the world’s population is currently unbanked or underbanked. In the USA alone, that’s nearly 25% of the population. That being said, in West Africa, 86% of the population is either unbanked or underbanked.
Growing up in a country in turmoil and despair, with a broken financial ecosystem, Ousmane Conde was one of the 300M unbanked people in West Africa, forced to carry cash around in order to pay for goods and services. Because he and his family have been living the struggle of the unbanked for generations, he decided to relocate back to West Africa to build PayCruiser, a reliable, scalable, and affordable payments platform for businesses and individuals to securely accept, access, and send money anywhere. PayCruiser leverages the power of Ousmane’s patent-pending technology to provide the one-stop SaaS platform for businesses and individuals to accept payments from the unbanked and send money anywhere, anytime and securely.
Ousmane Conde is the CEO. He has built and led information retrieval and A.I. teams for Fortune 100 companies (Europe & the US) and led a diverse group of senior software engineers and mobile developers for the past 15 years. In 2015, he was a recipient of the Black Engineer of the Year Award, Modern Day Technology Leader.
Growing up in West Africa, he was raised by a single mother and self-funded his education since high school, all while supporting his family. At 18, he founded his first company and led another startup to become a top 20 Big Data Solutions provider in the US.
Ousmane is a two-time Google Scholar and has received 12+ degrees and certifications in Computer Science and Leadership (UCLA, University of Lyon, Florida Memorial University, California Polytechnic, Pomona). In 2019, he paused his graduate studies at Harvard to focus on PayCruiser.
Enlighten us about the services you offer to society?
PayCruiser is how businesses get paid by unbanked customers. We connect the world’s 2.7 billion unbanked and underbanked population with the global financial ecosystem by turning their mobile devices into their bank account. This enables unbanked customers to buy and sell goods and services online, pay bills and send and receive money anywhere, anytime. Here is a demo of how it works: https://docsend.com/view/mhwvavd44y678tbr
Mobile money isn’t new, especially in Africa, but since mobile money transactions have been limited to transactions on stand-alone mobile carriers, its use has been limited to particular kinds of transactions. PayCruiser offers the ability to transact without mobile carrier constraints, enabling the unbanked to pay both their rent and mortgage (which represent a third of their monthly spending) as well as handling all of the unbanked’s other daily purchases and other payment transactions.
We believe that we are changing people’s lives for the good. For example, through our partnership with the government of Senegal, we built the SNHLM app, a white glove version of PayCruiser that currently makes paying monthly rents for 78,000 users in Senegal as convenient and straightforward as it is here in the United States while enabling the diaspora community to invest in real-estate back home through a fast and secured digital process. Here is a demo of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sXHmWQGkzQ
At PayCruiser, we aim to connect the global financial ecosystem with the world’s 2.7Bn unbanked (and underbanked) people, starting with West Africa. To do this, we knew that we needed to, first and foremost, be a ‘security first’ company. And so, the platform we built handles digital payments, cross-border payments, and fraud prevention (AML, KYC/B) with biometrics payments and verification systems; With PayCruiser®, businesses can securely pay and get paid via mobile money, credit cards, or ACH, no matter where their clients are located. Here is a demo of how PayCruiser leverages biometrics to secure payments and transactions on their platform
- Biometrics Payments: https://docsend.com/view/xjrejts7ekfidnhn
- Biometrics KYC & AML: https://docsend.com/view/d2p55xst4kkk9k63
As a Security-First SaaS platform, we offer advanced fraud protection and Anti Money Laundering (AML) solutions to financial institutions in developing countries: KYC/B, ID Verifications, Phone number verifications, OFAC, FBI, DEA, Interpol & +1000 Sanctions List Verifications. Here is an example of how our solution works: https://docsend.com/view/fipberypt9925ktk
We are a team of black engineers willing to change the world for the unbanked. Our mission is to include the 2.7B unbanked people around the world (which includes 25% of the U.S. population) into the global financial ecosystem so that they can strive and prosper on their own terms.
How does your company uphold its uniqueness and individuality?
The unbanked (and underbanked) population totals 2.7 billion people, most of whom reside in developing countries. This group struggles to access the global financial ecosystem, which at the most basic level means that they must pay most of their monthly bills with cash.
Platforms like PayPal, Square, Apple Pay, Zelle, Venmo, and Stripe are not active in these countries because the local populations don’t have the bank accounts or credit cards that are required to access these payment systems.
Solutions like Western Union and MoneyGram are both expensive, involve trips to local stores by both senders and receivers, and create a real-life security risk resulting from the necessity of both parties transporting cash across town.
To bridge these gaps, PayCruiser has created an enhanced digital payments technology platform that comes with robust built-in security.
PayCruiser’s mobile banking platform helps the 96 percent of Africans already relying on mobile money to freely transact outside the bounds of their mobile phone carrier.
Paycruiser is an inclusive and equitable financial technology built for the unbanked. And so, we’ve built an all-in-one super application that enables businesses and individuals to pay and get paid worldwide – hence, connecting the unbanked with the global economy. By default, unbanked people don’t have bank accounts or credit cards. And such, we built a technology that enables them to transact with the rest of the world by using their mobile device as a method of payment. Here is how it works: https://docsend.com/view/mhwvavd44y678tbr
Many women and girls in Africa are not fortunate enough to know how to read or write. This, by default, excludes them from the global financial market – So we created biometrics payments to enable this population (previously excluded) to freely transact at the world’s scale – Using their voice as a method of payment (since they cannot read or write). Here is a demo of how it works: https://docsend.com/view/xjrejts7ekfidnhn
Our technology infrastructure is built on a security-first and proprietary distributed ledger; our fast and flexible end-to-end distributed technology platform allows us to scale globally while quickly enabling customization to address local realities. However, we’re not only solving this problem with technology. It takes a combination of personal experiences, boots on the ground, flexibility, security, speed of delivery, and most importantly, a technology built with the unbanked in mind. For example, 65% of the unbanked population cannot read or write a western language and cannot open bank accounts by themselves. Our platform cost-effectively empowers this population to access the global financial ecosystem and engage in financial transactions independently. We are building and providing financial freedom to the unbanked community so that they can easily interact with the global financial ecosystem without the need for intermediaries.
Do you think you have heralded a change in the market, if so how?
96% of unbanked people in our target market now have access to mobile devices. Therefore, it was paramount for us to provide a mobile-first neobanking solution to our unbanked customers, allowing them to send and receive funds anywhere, pay bills, make online purchases, and save money anytime. And so, we built the mobilepay patent-pending technology to enable businesses and the unbanked to do all of the above (which are basic things we all take for granted in the western world). By doing so, we are including 2.7Bn unbanked people (½ of the world) into the global financial ecosystem.
Kindly mention some of the notable recognitions and accreditations received by your organisation.
- 30 Most Inspiring Leaders To Watch : https://thesiliconreview.com/magazine/profile/paycruiser-best-in-class-payment-solutions/
- Top 30 Admired Company To Watch: https://www.ciobulletin.com/magazine/paycruiser-most-advanced-security-platforms-for-commercial-financial-transactions?fbclid=IwAR02h0XWh1D_3DxKF2GmPZUdL6mE4y5fgoauvPYzjuOFZfx3Tstg3bl23XA
- 2015 Black Engineer of the Year Award recipient, Modern Day Technology Leader
- https://www.sunyocc.edu/news/occ-effect-ousmane-conde
- PayCruiser built Africa’s first mobile money POS terminal for businesses, enabling them to use their unbanked clients’ phone numbers as a method of payment
What is your advice to new and budding entrepreneurs today?
1- The bread and the butter: All you need to bootstrap your idea into a company, is a computer, high speed internet connection and an idea you are willing to sacrifice your time for. The rest will naturally come to you.
2- Fail forward: You will fail multiple times along the way. As long as you fail forward and get back up (like Denzel Washington says), you will move forward.
2- Keep your broke man’s mentality and strive to become too big to fail: Build your product with the broke man’s mentality, knowing that it will be used by 6bn people tomorrow (not in 10 years, but tomorrow). This will force you to think of concepts like security, scale, SLA, compliance, cost, reliability, brand, trust—Most successful startups think of this when it is too late. Don’t be that guy. Because, if you manifest that idea and build your product accordingly, it will be used by people around the entire world and you will become too big to fail (with or without investors)
3- Be your first investor: Most startups fail; most investors are sharks. They won’t believe in you until you start becoming successful. Most people will not trust you until the rest of the world does. You know, in reality, when it comes to investing in startups, very few want to be first, but everyone wants to claim the benefits of first. That is: Everyone will want a huge piece of your pie while requiring you to do the labor alone. To avoid a situation like this, follow Cardi B’d advise: Get a Lawyer. Your lawyer will (by law) never intensionally lead you to a bad deal. So, no matter how expensive it may be, get a lawyer in the beginning. This will pay off big time afterwards.
4- Go big or go home: Most of your early supporters will try to derail you into the « focus on only one thing» and «start small» road. What they are trying to tell you is that, they don’t want you to fail and so, want you to play safe (by minimizing risk for failure). But remember, how why you started your company in the first place. It was not to help 5 people. You did not put your entire life on the line, to play small. And if this is the case, then, you should enjoy the life of an employee—not that of an entrepreneur.
5- There’s the dreamers and there’s the doers: You will need both, but not at the same time. Start with the dreamers but make sure, you always have the doers in your books. They are the ones making it happen for real. And when, in exceptional situations, you find doers that are also dreamers. Give them a piece of the cake and treat them like family. They will make you fly faster and higher.
8- Experience and Education matter less than passion and drive for a mission you deeply believe in
9- Your product is a reflection of your personality
10- Build good software, fast and so cheap that the competitor will have to buy you out if they want to win.
11- keep everything simple stupid. Users should always be at most, 3 clicks away from what they want to do.
12- With mistakes, come opportunities
13- Go big or go home. And remember what A great man said when he was almost knocked out: The ground is no place for a champ.
14- Success is not about what you have. It is about what you do with what you have.
