Every day, millions of transactions happen in the African business environment. Kwadwo, a fintech startup founder in Kenya, is almost at his wit’s end because he just can’t find a way to pay for his business tools like AWS, Slack, Mailchimp, etc; Bola, the finance manager at a large supply chain company in Nigeria, is struggling to send a chunk of money to her supplier in London; Ebiyaa, the owner of a fast-growing restaurant in Ghana, needs to pay her grapes supplier in France.
They all have a similar problem - how do they move money from their local currency across the border to the receiver in record time? The answer seems simple: Cross-border payments, but Ebenezer Ghanney, founder of WeWire, quickly found out that existing solutions were not readily available and often tedious to use. This began the journey to building WeWire.
Building WeWire
While Eben was a Country Manager with a retail-based financial company, he saw a massive demand for cross-border payment solutions from many business owners who wanted to move money from one market to another. Accessing FX liquidity at the right price points was difficult for them. Liquidity was either unavailable in the currency they needed or priced too high, or when the first two aligned, settlement took too long. This meant losing money and business opportunities and being condemned to operating only in their primary market even when there was a world of vast opportunities to explore outside their borders.
Businesses needed a fast, reliable, and dynamic payment vehicle for their currency needs. In April 2022, WeWire was formally launched as the solution to these cross-border payment challenges faced by businesses. The dream was to create a sustainable and scalable product that sits at the intersection of businesses and the markets they want to reach.
The first WeWire OTC desk was set up in April 2022 to enable business owners in Ghana to trade African currencies and access FX liquidity. Within a short time, we began to see traction on the OTC desk. Customers were coming in with Cedis, Naira, and Kenyan Shillings and requesting international payments to the US, UK, China, and many other countries for their manufacturing, tech, logistics, and import businesses. At the end of our first year of business, we hit a transaction volume of $210m, generated primarily from businesses in Ghana! We can truly say the Gold Coast gave us gold; there was more to do.
Our clients across industries were making recurrent transactions and bringing in referrals daily. We iterated on the platform and built an ecosystem of products that made every step of the journey for business cross-border payments seamless and fast, from collections to disbursement, settlement, and treasury advisory. We replicated the OTC platform with a customer-facing web app that allows customers to enjoy fully digital cross-border payments through multi-currency wallets and dollar-denominated virtual business cards. Through our most recent strategic partnership, we now provide virtual NGN accounts to business owners worldwide.
Expansion
Expanding out of Ghana became a no-brainer as our client base began to enter new markets. One of our earliest clients, a top payroll processing company, expanded operations into Nigeria, and we were the first point of call they made as they set up in the country. They needed speed and reliability at competitive rates, and we delivered that and more.
Requests like this became regular and saw us expand and set up shop in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, the US, UAE, and Canada. It validated our brand's goal to see businesses who have worked with us over the years experience growth and break boundaries without being limited by non-functional payment solutions.
Following our expansion drive and increased capabilities across countries and currencies, the business felt the impact and recorded an all-time high of $1.1bn in transactions processed across 80+ countries. They say the average lifespan of a startup is three years, but in barely 22 months, WeWire has beaten the odds, painted Ghana orange, and continued to expand its reach and impact into new countries.
At the root of what we do is the need to give businesses a chance to play globally without worrying about how payments will move across borders or losing funds during conversions. We have transformed borders from a limitation for businesses to an opportunity for growth.
Our vision has continued to expand its wings beyond Africa's borders, and WeWire now trades multiple foreign and local currencies in China, Mauritius, Canada, Belgium, etc. WeWire boasts of a smooth, fast, and fully compliant onboarding process and turnaround time of T+1, a record in the industry!
Market Opportunity
2023 saw the Total Addressable Market for business-to-business cross-border payments hit $39.3tn. This number could be higher if the limitation of lack of access to seamless cross-border payment is addressed.
We envision a world where WeWire's suite of cross-border payment solutions can be easily accessible to business owners across Africa and make accessing and managing FX liquidity easy for them. Over the past few years, we have processed transactions for financial institutions, pharmaceuticals, automobile companies, Agriculture and hospitality importers and exporters, FMCGs, Travel Agencies, Cargo and logistics, Oil and Gas, and OEM Distributors. We have no plans to slow down.
We aim to help small and medium-sized businesses, which are the key contributors to GDP and the growth of African economies. Agriculture and food are vital sectors we serve because they represent value in the drive toward ending poverty and hunger and achieving food security in Africa's poverty-plagued environment. In the coming year, we are deepening our activities in the agricultural sectors, helping aggregator farmers, food producers, importers, exporters, and restaurant owners access liquidity to trade and on-the-go treasury management for their funds.
Becoming Something More
To accommodate the size of our vision and the market opportunities we have identified, we are rebranding from Wewire Africa to WeWire. With payout capabilities in over 80 countries, including China, Canada, the US, the UK, Belgium, Germany, and many others, it is crucial that our branding accurately represents the value that we bring—global cross-border payment solutions.
WeWire is a payment ecosystem that covers all aspects of cross-border payments, from OTC trades to multi-currency wallets, virtual accounts, payouts and collections, live rates updates, etc. We have helped over 1500 businesses cross borders through payment, and now, our playground is beyond Africa.
From a financial technology company out of Ghana, WeWire has grown its technology and its people. Over the years, we have added strategic hires to the team to improve the quality and efficiency of our service delivery. Unsurprisingly, in December 2023, WeWire was recognized as the Largest B2B Tech Startup out of Ghana and won the Fintech of the Year award at the Ghana Innovation and Startup Awards. These awards are not just laurels on our sleeves but a testament to the reliability of our solutions for thousands of businesses.
What the future holds
In less than 3 years, we have given customers access to a round-the-clock OTC money transfer service, multi-currency wallets, virtual accounts, and cards. We are taking on a new adventure to place a mobile and more accessible version of WeWire in the market and provide an integration that allows businesses to access our technology to aggregate rates across multiple liquidity providers. We see a world where businesses of all sizes can use WeWire as a hub for business payment, treasury services and financial education.
The end goal is to make business and individual cross-border payments happen at record-breaking speed, and we just might beat Usain Bolt's record. As we gaze into the horizon of innovation and opportunity, WeWire stands poised on the brink of a new era in global finance. Our journey from humble beginnings to international acclaim has been one of relentless dedication to empowering businesses, transcending borders, and shaping the future of cross-border payments.
Join us on this extraordinary journey as we pave the way for a world where borders are not barriers, but gateways to limitless opportunity. Together, let's break boundaries, cross borders and soar to new heights of success. The future of cross-border is here, and it's called WeWire.
