According to reports, three out of ten payments fail in Africa. A fragmented payments landscape, invalid cards, dormant accounts, and higher dispute rates are some of the factors behind this.
Digital payments in Africa are growing at a rate of 20% a year. While gateways and Aggregators make it easier for businesses to accept multiple payment methods, few solutions exist to deal with payment failures that arise from each platform. Revio is a South African company that provides payment and collection services. The company which makes it easier for businesses to connect to multiple payment methods and manage payment failures has raised more than one million dollars in seed funding.
The fund and two culture capital participated in the round. According to a statement shared by the startup, several angel investors also participated.
Ruaan Botha started Revio. After seeing how much time and manual effort businesses spend in engaging customers on outstanding and failed payments, Botha decided to launch Revio. It was clear that a lot of companies didn't invest in revenue recovery. Most of the clients who were asked where they would invest $1 if they had to fix their payment systems said they would spend most of it on customer service.
The debit order is the largest recurring payment method in the country. It was difficult for businesses to add other payment methods when they wanted to deal with demand. Businesses were not able to collect recurring revenue on an ongoing basis because of the lack of communication between banks, new fintechs and payment Aggregators. We wanted to make it easy for businesses to connect any payment methods that they need, not only in South Africa but the rest of Africa as well.
There are three executives who run the company affairs, including the chief commercial officer, an ex-country lead, and the chief technology officer.
Revio aggregates and organizes multiple payment methods in Africa including card, bank transfer, debit order, mobile money, vouchers, andQR code. Payment providers like Paystack, Ozow and Stitch are used by the platform to collect and settle payments. In addition to multiple payment methods, it has features such as smart paymentrouting, automated billing processes, auto-retires, and real-time analytic and reporting.
Botha is the CEO.
Over the course of a year, Revio has onboarded over 50 clients. They range from large-scale enterprises to mid-market corporates, and fast-growing scale-ups that need multiple payment methods in multiple markets. Insurers, telcos, retailers, subscription software or media, asset leasing or financing businesses are some of the businesses that are included.
In order to make sure a customer doesn't go into arrears on recurring payments, we've built out an ability to reduce payment failures through things like smart transaction routing, smart retries. We serve businesses with recurring revenue, which is different from the typical e- commerce platforms. Revio has over 100 clients waiting to be onboarded, according to her.
In today's world where businesses operate in multiple countries and need an array of payment methods to get by, payment management is becoming more important. While a handful of such platforms have existed in the U.S. and Europe, businesses in developing markets are starting to see similar platforms.
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Revio claims that it is the first African payments platform that focuses on payment failures and revenue recovery. The platform has more features and coverage in the sub-Saharan African context than other platforms in the market. There is more than enough space for newer platforms in the global payments orchestrator market, which is growing at a fast pace.
One of the reasons why the two-year-old fintech raised this capital is to move into new markets within and outside Africa, expand its team and launch new products for its increasing clientele.
The use investment is twofold according to Botha. To grow and drive better engagement with customers, we need access to more strategic skills around machine learning and data. We can begin to experiment with some of the core markets in Africa with the data from that. In the next 18 months, we want to operate in 13 African countries, but only in a few large markets. We can take on other emerging markets such as Latin America.
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