HiPipo Money

For start-ups, micro, small and medium sized enterprises (MSMEs), proceeds from sales are in many cases immediately injected back in to the operations of the business. Many never have a luxury of having huge capital to keep them running for weeks, in to months like big players are able to.

As such, such businesses always need seamless payment collections platforms that ensure that for whatever sale made, the money is remitted immediately so that to keep the business in good health. While several payment aggregators and enablers promise this, it is a just a few that actually do this. One of the players that is enabling MSMEs effectively collect and make payments is PayTota.

Launched in 2020, Paytota is an all-in-one online payment gateway solution that allows individuals and businesses to make and accept payments from local and international buyers and sellers. To enable this, it has integrated with local and international payment facilitators such as Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) like MTN Mobile Money and Airtel Money, Banks, and Payment Cards Operators like Visa and Mastercard.

According to Erasmus Okurut, the founder and CEO of PayTota, his company is a ground-breaking financial technology company that empowers businesses by providing an inclusive platform that eases their payments in terms of acceptance and also disbursements.

“We are a total payment solution that empowers businesses not only in Uganda but in the entire continent and the global. We have developed and customized a platform that allows any business to be able to accept payments. To enroll with PayTota, you just go to our website and sign up an account. You will then be asked to submit some documents as per the know your customer/business guidelines. Once your documents are received and verified, your account will be activated, integration will be done and you will start accepting payments,” Okurut explained.

He added: “We have also developed hosted pages, commonly know as check outs. A business that wants to accept payments, reaches out to us, we design these pages for you, embed them on your website and you start accepting payments. We accept mobile money and card payments. We regard ourselves as payments aggregators and operators.”

Okurut revealed that they derive the mandate to manage payments from Bank of Uganda as PayTota is fully licensed.

“We are a regulated payment gateway by Bank of Uganda. We have a license as a payment operator for small funds and third-party systems. That license gives us permission to be able to process payments for our partners. That is why over 400 businesses in Uganda and across the World trust us to manage their payments. We have had over 5000 transactions and processed over USD 400,000.”

PayTota has featured on Day 29 of the annual 40 Days 40 FinTechs initiative Season 5.

Run under HiPipo’s Include Everyone program that also encompasses other initiatives such as FinTech Landscape Exhibition, Women in FinTech Hackathon, Summit & Incubator, and the Digital and Financial Inclusion Summit and Digital Impact Awards Africa; the #40Days40FinTechs platform aptly provides a setting for the various players and stakeholders involved in digital and financial technology to exhibit their products and services. It also gives players a platform to share their ideas on how the unserved and underserved by the present financial systems can be brought into the fold.

With over 150 participants in the last four years, #40Days40FinTechs continues to be the world’s premier showcase event for innovations that are enabling underserved populations to join the digital economy space. We know that this can only get better owing to the inspiration and collaboration of our partners; Level One Project, Mojaloop Foundation, INFITX, Cyberplc Academy, Ideation Corner, and Crosslake Technologies. Most importantly, the initiative owes its continued success to the generous support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

For Uganda to achieve last mile financial inclusion, there must be special focus on the unserved and underserved. This means that there must be equitable distribution and access to financial services.

Several innovators have developed and rolled out solutions aimed at democratizing savings and borrowing. But more efforts are needed if financial inclusion is to be achieved.

Among the platforms that are enabling people at the bottom of the pyramid to be able to save and access digital credit services is PesaSave.

According to Steven Emalu, the Co-Founder and Team Lead at PesaSave, they started PesaSave to address the challenges faced by those unable to be served by formal financial systems. He noted that around 2022, together with his colleagues, they tried to access credit from a bank, only to be locked out by the much paperwork, business data and lack of collateral accepted by the bank. This inspired them to start a platform that would offer an alternative to the unbanked, unserved and underserved.

“At PesaSave, we build financial technology solutions for the underserved and unbanked populations with a large focus on the Youth. We do this through the PesaSave Application that allows individuals mainly the Youth to create specific targets towards their financial needs and they periodically save towards achieving these goals. The Application is easy to access and use thus its users don’t need to travel to deposit their savings and the platform is transparent thus allowing them to track their savings,” Steven Emalu said.

He added: “We also work with groups of individuals mainly in informal sectors. These join as a group and start saving. Through these savings, they are able to meet their goals and also access credit. We are trying to create an alternative to credit as these unbanked and underserved groups are not able to access credit from formal financial institutions.”

Emalu highlighted that individual saving is open to any adult interested in saving money towards meeting a specific financial goal while group savings are for individuals that come together and agree to save as a group, agree on the saving period and the purpose of the savings.

“Both individuals and groups are able to access affordable credit against their savings. We ensure that when a group saves, individual members are able to access part of these savings as credit at an interest and terms determined by each group. Well as the credit has no collateral, those borrowing must have guarantors. So far, we are serving about 28 groups and over 600 individuals.”

He noted that to execute this work, PesaSave has partnered with licensed operators such as PayTota to support their payments and collections. He revealed that before the end of the year, they will also have a commercial bank partner and thus serve their customers better.

PesaSave has featured on Day 28 of the annual 40 Days 40 FinTechs initiative Season 5.

Run under HiPipo’s Include Everyone program that also encompasses other initiatives such as FinTech Landscape Exhibition, Women in FinTech Hackathon, Summit & Incubator, and the Digital and Financial Inclusion Summit and Digital Impact Awards Africa; the #40Days40FinTechs platform aptly provides a setting for the various players and stakeholders involved in digital and financial technology to exhibit their products and services. It also gives players a platform to share their ideas on how the unserved and underserved by the present financial systems can be brought into the fold.

With over 150 participants in the last four years, #40Days40FinTechs continues to be the world’s premier showcase event for innovations that are enabling underserved populations to join the digital economy space. We know that this can only get better owing to the inspiration and collaboration of our partners; Level One Project, Mojaloop Foundation, INFITX, Cyberplc Academy, Ideation Corner, and Crosslake Technologies. Most importantly, the initiative owes its continued success to the generous support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Not a day passes without an event in Uganda. It is either a music, dance and drama show or a themed party, or a sports activity or a professional gathering or cultural gathering, name it.

For all these events, there is one unique problem; the pain involved in accessing tickets. Save for a few events, in most cases, buying tickets and accessing the venues for these events is always a huge mess. This is usually because the tickets are manually sold and physically checked before one can actually attend their event of choice. This old way of doing things comes with so many problems top among them being fraud, theft, commotion and confusion.

That said, all this can be cured by one solution – digitized ticketing systems that allow revelers to book their seats, pay for tickets from wherever they are and turn up on the event day with digital tickets that only need a scan to confirm authenticity before they are let in.

Among the companies that are offering the digitized tickets alternative is Ticket Yo; a start-up that is focused on managing ticketing for events.

“We are an events’ ticketing platform. We are simplifying and streamlining the ticket acquisition process with in the Uganda Entertainment Industry. We help event organizers get their tickets in the easiest and fastest way possible to their target audiences. As an event organizer, you register with us, list your tickets and make them available. We then create for you a dashboard that indicates the numbers of visitors on your link, actually sales and money collected,” John Allan Ojera, the Founder of Ticket Yo said.

He added: “For the customers/revelers, they simply go to our website, choose the event they want to attend and then enter their emails and mobile numbers so that we are able to deliver to them the tickets digitally once they pay. A customer can then pay with either mobile money or bank cards after which they get a confirmation of payment. We then generate a ticket encrypted with security features and a unique QR code which we then share with the customer. This is what the customer presents on the event day.”

Ticket Yo has featured on Day 27 of the annual 40 Days 40 FinTechs initiative Season 5.

Run under HiPipo’s Include Everyone program that also encompasses other initiatives such as FinTech Landscape Exhibition, Women in FinTech Hackathon, Summit & Incubator, and the Digital and Financial Inclusion Summit and Digital Impact Awards Africa; the #40Days40FinTechs platform aptly provides a setting for the various players and stakeholders involved in digital and financial technology to exhibit their products and services. It also gives players a platform to share their ideas on how the unserved and underserved by the present financial systems can be brought into the fold.

With over 150 participants in the last four years, #40Days40FinTechs continues to be the world’s premier showcase event for innovations that are enabling underserved populations to join the digital economy space. We know that this can only get better owing to the inspiration and collaboration of our partners; Level One Project, Mojaloop Foundation, INFITX, Cyberplc Academy, Ideation Corner, and Crosslake Technologies. Most importantly, the initiative owes its continued success to the generous support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Uganda is blessed with hundreds of talented and competent Artisans. However, many of these are unable to showcase their skills due to absence of a ready and stable market for their services.

While their services are needed by different customers on a daily, linking up with these customers is usually a problem. It is this gap that Uncle Bob was established to close with the help of technology.

Uncle Bob is a digital platform that reimagines connections in a lively marketplace, uniting professionals from various fields with those seeking their expertise, turning connections into collaborations and dreams into reality.

Its key features include Home Solutions, Business to Business solutions, Artisans and Stores.

“Uncle Bob is a mobile APP that links customers to Artisans. What we do is that we onboard young men and women on Uncle Bob and make them available to customers who need their services. A customer only needs to download our APP, create an account, make a request for a service provider and we shall automatically link them to a professional service provider. Before we onboard any service provider, we take them through a series of competence assessment to ensure that each Artisan is qualified for the service s/he says they offer,” Denis Tusubira Kamira, the Project Coordinator, Uncle Bob said.

He added: “For example if a customer is looking for electrical services, when they log on to the APP, they will find different services. The customer will then select “Electrical Services,” and a dropdown of the various services under Electrical will appear. The customer will then select the exact service they need, when they need it and then submit the request. We usually encourage the customers to first submit an inspect and quote request so that the Artisan first shows up, gets to know the details of the job and then issues a proper quotation for this job.”

Mr Tusubira emphasized that Uncle Bob not only connects the Artisans to customers but also follows up to ensure that each job was completed before the service providers get paid.

“The platform has integrated with two Aggregators – Yo Uganda and Pegasus. When a customer makes a payment via mobile money, it is deducted and received on our account and the job will be accepted on the system. Once the job is done, we get a confirmation from the customer that job has been completed after which we transfer the payment to the Artisan. In future, we intend to integrate directly with mobile money operators so that to make our services faster and seamless for Artisans and customers.”

He highlighted that Uncle Bob has so far identified about 5000 Artisans with in Kampala, Mukono and Wakiso, and onboarded over 3,500 Artisans. He noted that Uncle Bob is supported by Mastercard Foundation and Private Sector Foundation Uganda through the Lead Firm Structure program.

Uncle Bob has featured on Day 26 of the annual 40 Days 40 FinTechs initiative Season 5.

Run under HiPipo’s Include Everyone program that also encompasses other initiatives such as FinTech Landscape Exhibition, Women in FinTech Hackathon, Summit & Incubator, and the Digital and Financial Inclusion Summit and Digital Impact Awards Africa; the #40Days40FinTechs platform aptly provides a setting for the various players and stakeholders involved in digital and financial technology to exhibit their products and services. It also gives players a platform to share their ideas on how the unserved and underserved by the present financial systems can be brought into the fold.

With over 150 participants in the last four years, #40Days40FinTechs continues to be the world’s premier showcase event for innovations that are enabling underserved populations to join the digital economy space. We know that this can only get better owing to the inspiration and collaboration of our partners; Level One Project, Mojaloop Foundation, INFITX, Cyberplc Academy, Ideation Corner, and Crosslake Technologies. Most importantly, the initiative owes its continued success to the generous support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Uganda is an agro based economy. As a result of this, efforts to modernize agriculture and make it much more profitable are always welcome. 

In the last one decade, several initiatives aimed at transforming agriculture have been rolled out. While many have yielded positive results, some failed badly. However, those focused on digitizing the agricultural value chain continue to flourish.

Among the entities that are offering digital services to hundreds of farmers is MobiPay; a platform that seeks to revolutionize the agricultural sector, making it more efficient, transparent, and inclusive.

“We are an Agri-FinTech that provides technological services to farming communities. Part of our main work is to ensure that farmers can have access to digital services, able to receive payments for their products, able to pay for inputs digitally and also access a wider market. We were established in 2016 and went to the market in 2017. We have both the MobiPay and Agrosys platforms which are both integrated to offer seamless services to farmers,” Eric Nana Kwabena Agyei, the Founder of MobiPay AgroSys Limited said.

He added: “Together with my co-founder we did some study in 2015. We wanted to find out if financial institutions were willing to lend to smallholder farmers. What we found out was that small holder farmers had a major risk because they didn’t have data of what they had been doing. We noticed that this high risk made it hard for financial institutions to lend to the farmers. Even input providers couldn’t extend credit due to lack of data. So, we decided to create a platform that would use technology to make farmers credit worthy and able to access all these services.”

Mr Nana Kwabena noted that currently they are operating with about 400,000 farmers across Uganda with about 25 per cent of these being active currently and happy with the MobiPay service.

“We are working across 86 districts in Uganda. We have offices in the East, North and Kampala. We are also working with about 240 agents. Most of the farmers we are working with belong to cooperatives. But a farmer who doesn’t belong to any farmer group or cooperative can directly reach out to us and we shall gladly serve them. But currently, over 90 per cent of our customers come from farmer groups.”

The key services that MobiPay offers are access to inputs, market match & access to market information, access to Agricultural training, Agriculture diagnosis and access to Agronomy services.

MobiPay has featured on Day 25 of the annual 40 Days 40 FinTechs initiative Season 5.

Run under HiPipo’s Include Everyone program that also encompasses other initiatives such as FinTech Landscape Exhibition, Women in FinTech Hackathon, Summit & Incubator, and the Digital and Financial Inclusion Summit and Digital Impact Awards Africa; the #40Days40FinTechs platform aptly provides a setting for the various players and stakeholders involved in digital and financial technology to exhibit their products and services. It also gives players a platform to share their ideas on how the unserved and underserved by the present financial systems can be brought into the fold.

With over 150 participants in the last four years, #40Days40FinTechs continues to be the world’s premier showcase event for innovations that are enabling underserved populations to join the digital economy space. We know that this can only get better owing to the inspiration and collaboration of our partners; Level One Project, Mojaloop Foundation, INFITX, Cyberplc Academy, Ideation Corner, and Crosslake Technologies. Most importantly, the initiative owes its continued success to the generous support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.