Visa, the world’s second-largest card payment processor, has made an investment in four of the 23 startups in the first batch of the Visa Fintech Accelerator. These startups are Oze, a commercial banking platform in Ghana; Orda, a Nigerian restaurant tech startup; WorkPay, a Kenyan HR and payroll company, and OkHi, a startup that provides AI-powered address verification services.
If you’re wondering why food tech and HR companies are joining fintech accelerators, these platforms have payment technology built in.
Oze (Ghana): Oze provides small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with digital tools for accounting and embedded finance. It offers a credit management platform for financial institutions with machine learning-powered credit scoring, giving SMEs access to affordable finance and supporting their growth.
Workpay (Kenya): This HR technology company provides a cloud-based payroll and HR platform across 35 African countries. Workpay streamlines payroll, time and attendance, benefits administration and even employer record services, helping businesses seamlessly manage the entire employee lifecycle.
OkHi (Nigeria): OkHi’s intelligent address system enables accurate address verification, helping businesses verify and find customers more efficiently. The innovation supports delivery logistics and improves access to services, especially for financial institutions.
ORDA (Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa): ORDA is digitizing restaurant operations at over 1,500 venues with cloud-based solutions for order processing, inventory management and integrated financial services, helping restaurants streamline and scale their operations.
Visa’s Investment Strategy
What’s most interesting about Visa’s announcement is how much investment these companies are getting. Visa said this is part of its $1 billion investment plan in Africa and called it a “strategic investment.”
If a large company were to use this language, the investment in question would be cash or credit for free access to Visa’s infrastructure such as payment gateways, cards and APIs, potentially significantly reducing the startup’s outlay.
This latter approach provides a direct return on investment for the card processor. Chari founder and CEO Ismail Belkayat, who was part of Visa’s first batch of Africa accelerators, previously explained that the accelerator is one of several ways Visa is “helping more startups become publishers that get cards to end users.”
If the funding is cash-based, it will not be Visa’s first direct investment in an African startup. In 2019, Visa acquired a 20% stake in Interswitch, Nigeria’s largest card processor, for $200 million. The company has also previously invested in Paystack, Branch, South Africa’s Jumo, and Sudanese startup Bloom.
