FLUTTERWAVE - UNVEILING THE NEW EMERGING AFRICAN FINANCIAL SOLUTIONS

#flutterwave

OUTLINES
Introduction
Mission and Vision Statement
Products lines/ services
Achievements
Pros and Cons of the company
Business Integration
Corporate Social Responsibility
Recommendations
Conclusion

INTRODUCTION
Founded in 2016 by a team of African finance and technology veterans from Standard Bank, PayPal, Google Wallet amongst others, Flutterwave has grown to become one of the fastest growing payments companies in the world. Since inception Flutterwave has processed close to $2 billion in payments and 25 million transactions across over 33 African countries where it currently operates. It has its Headquarters in San Francisco, USA.
The birth of Flutterwave as a new emerging financial firm rewrite the history of Nigeria in style as 26 years old Iyin Aboyeji and his cofounder Gbenga Agboola took the whole world by surprise.
Flutterwave , a payment infrastructure has gotten approval from the Central Bank of Nigeria for the use of Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) technology for its product. This USSD is an addition to other payment channels it already offered and affirm the firm’s commitment to staying true to its promise to provide modern payment infrastructure that would empower Africans.
Flutterwave provides an end to end payments platform that covers all bases in payment process.

MISSION STATEMENT
At Flutterwave, our mission is to inspire a new wave of prosperity across Africa by building payment infrastructure to connect Africa to the global economy by building technology, tools, and infrastructure for businesses and banks who want to provide a more seamless and secure payments experience for their customers.

PRODUCT LINES / SERVICES
Some of the popular products/services of Flutterwave are as stated below:

Rave – The payment solutions which makes it easier with secure and reliable tools. It is a complete integration system that includes

mobilemoney, credit & Debit card, USSD, Cashless token and ACH

GetBarter – This app based offering is aimed at facilitating personal and small merchant payments within countries and across Africa’s borders. Existing Visa cardholders can send and receive funds at home or internationally on GetBarter

Moneywave – This is Flutterwave’s disbursement solution that allows you to transfer money to any bank account in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. It also allows you to build wallet solutions and mobile money solutions as it allows you to create wallets and enable you to do transfers between your wallets

Glovepay – Payment system called Glovepay which takes the of wearing a special glove to execute a handshake to care out a transaction

Flutterwave Pay with Bank Transfer – Flutterwave has just introduce another product to ease the mode of doing business in Nigeria is .This is what they called “Flutterwave Pay With Bank Transfer” payment method. In its first 9 weeks, Flutterwave Pay with Bank Transfer has witnessed 20,000+ transactions. It is currently operational in Nigeria alone and efforts are on-going to extend its service to other countries. The product is user friendly as it accommodate all to operate no matter the level of your education.

Partnership with PayAttitude – Another product from the stable of Flutterwave that worth mentioning is new partnership with PayAttitude, that only requires your customer’s phone number for a successful payment to occur. If the customer is not a PayAttitude customer yet, they have to get PayAttitude first to be able to use this payment method. This is yet another milestone for us in our quest to ensure that you have as many payment methods as you require for your business to grow exponentially. We hope that you will explore these methods and derive maximum value from them.

ACHIEVEMENTS
Flutterwave, which provides modern payment infrastructure for banks and businesses to make and accepts payment across Africa, announced that it has raised over $10 million in a Series A round of funding

Flutterwave has launched a technology which uses digital payments infrastructure that assist banks and business to build seamless, cutting edge and secured payment system for their customers.

Flutterwave has revolutionized the financial sector with their state of art technology used to work it and their integration with other financial firm across the world.

PROS AND CONS OF THE COMPANY
In terms of pros which put Flutterwave over above its competitors, we can say that:
There is a low risk of fraud as long as you log on to their authentic website and not clones. Just make sure it is https and not http. This assurance is enough evidence why people now prefer to carry out their any financial transaction where it is secure.
For the cons, this is the only issue raised by their customers which still subjected to further findings.
The only observation as regard to consumer dissatisfaction on their service is the genuine complaint about how the customer service centre handle cases of uncompleted transaction that sometimes occur which make them wait endlessly before solution come their way.
Business Integration
Flutterwave has carve an inch for itself and it is a business firm that has maintained a harmonious and symbiotic relationship with other world class accounting and online business firms. It has built business integration with other firms who share the idea of greatness with them. Some of them are listed below:

Shopify – a company that has a single dashboard to manage orders, shipping and payments anywhere you go. Rave in many cases has been integrated with shopify to make selling online easier than you can imagine.

Quickbooks – This is a world class accounting firm with cloud accounting software, with this facility, you can be red assured that your data is safe and secured and it is always available at your fingertips. They deploy multiple devices technology to manage your book.

Zero – They are also world class innovators in online accounting software

Squarespace – They are basically online stores, to marketing tools and analytics, squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence.

Sage – This is another cloud solutions to manage finances

Zoho – It is all about managing any financial transactions

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITIES(CSR) OF THE COMPANY
It has become one of the core values of Flutterwave to give back to the society that made them. That is the reason why it has been embedded into their system to feature their banner and corporate symbol in any event which impart positively to human existence. Some of those events are featured in this article below:
Flutterwave partner with AfroPolitan to promote African value and heritage by organizing entertainment events among Africa and Africa in diaspora. This is particularly significant because it means that no matter where they are in the world, customers can secure tickets to attend events like Afro Nation, Afrochella and Detty Rave events and pay securely through Flutterwave.”

At Greenspring School in Lagos, they prepare the students for future engagement.This what formed the basis of the 4 week internship collaboration with Flutterwave, a leading Fintech company based in Lagos.
Last Saturday, the 21st of September, 2019, Flutterwave organized a job fair tag “Flutterwave Developer Job Fair 2019”. The event was a successful as it feature creme de la creme in financial and tech industries. Check out their Social Media channels for more details.

Face App and Security Concern – As a responsible business entity, Flutterwave draw the attention of online user of internet App called “Face App” to their terms and conditions of the usage of that app which 90% of the users don’t bother at all to check and the usage of the App subjected users to cyber attack and undue exposure to security attack inform of hacking of their accounts to filter out their vital information.

RECOMMENDATIONS
I will advise the management to leverage on the new window of opportunity provided by the CBN on their cashless policy which has been in existence since 2011 but later reinforce recently. They should launch their state of the art technology they possess to leverage on this new opportunity as move people will be captured who will be in need of their service as it is now costlier now to transact business with cash.
In another dimension, they should venture into sponsoring of sporting activities as it commands large number of followerships in terms of its acceptability among the youths. this will bring the popularity of their products right to the door steps of their potential customers who may not have been aware of their existence compared with their closest rival in their industry.

In the same vein, sponsorship of educational programmes such as quiz competition among the higher institution of learning to discover new talents who may decide to take a career part in both financial and tech industries later in life and also educate Nigerians populate on the need to be financially conscious, prudent in the management of their scarce resources and how to manage their investment optimally.

CONCLUSION
There is no gainsaying that Flutterwave together with their products has become a household name. It has been proven that with the right environment, Nigerian youths can deliver at anytime. It is hard to believe that a project which was conceived, nurtured and developed by a 26 years old man has achieved so much within a spate of 3 years of its establishment.
For Flutterwave, the future is bright as they continue to build on their core value of their policy of transparency, financial inclusion, seamless and cutting edge technology to dispense financial transactions all over the world. We will continue to lend out our support for the firm to achieve its mission as they take us to the next level where distance and time will not be a barrier to transact business globally.