Let me share with you the story of Expresspay - a Ghanaian Fintech owned by 4 Ghanaian guys.

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ExpressPay was founded by 4 Ghanaians: Curtis Vanderpuije, Kojo Hesse, Kwei Hesse @KweiHesse & William Tetteh. Curtis, William & Kojo schooled together in Ghana & MIT whereas Kwei schooled & lived in Canada.

Curtis had always wanted to come back home after schooling and working with @Visa for a number of years, to solve a problem. The obvious problem he found was in paying for services online. There was no working solution for him outside of going out to pay in person.

So he decided to tackle this problem. Curtis had the perception that he’d come home and get ExpressPay working instantly but after consulting with a friend who had made a similar decision, he was advised to: “Assume that you are not going to make any money for the next 2 years...

... and make sure you have at least two years of savings to take you through”.

He spoke to his partners and they decided to come back home and start ExpressPay together.

They had developed a small prototype they showed to a couple of vendors and system providers when he came down to Ghana. The response was overwhelmingly positive so naturally, they decided to explore it further. They began in 2012.

ExpressPay started out as just a platform to pay for services. They started by reaching out to companies pitching to them why they thought this was a good platform for them to take payments on.

They were often frustrated by having to chase companies all the time to get them to sign on or even secure a meeting. For one particular company, they had to go to their offices at least 50 times before securing a meeting.

However, their persistence paid off and with time, they signed on a couple more companies. As growth came, customers demanded to have more features on the platform like sending money, paying utility bills and airtime, sending mobile money among other features.

Before they were able to build relationships with service and network providers, they had to do a lot of the backend work manually. For instance, they had to drive around buying airtime from street vendors before transferring it to clients phones.

This process was so seamless and effective that people actually thought there were systems behind the scene. The 4 partners raised their first round of funding from family & friends to keep them going. In 2015, they received a $100k grant from the @gatesfoundation to help growth

Some of the challenges they faced, in the beginning, was getting customers to accept online transactions as a secure means of payment, competition and pricing. They resorted to fixing these problems in 3 ways.

1. They decided to create an amazing user experience on their application. Good user experience on their mobile app as against in the traditional USSD on mobile money platforms meant that customers had a more seamless and comfortable experience using their platform vs timeouts

& hiccups of USSDs.

2. Create top-notch & proactive customer service experience for their clients. This ensured that the onboarding process for new clients was easy & smooth. It also made certain that clients always knew what the status of an issue was so they were not left

hanging. One time, they had to physically go to the office of ECG go get them to go all the way to a clients house to check on a postpaid billing problem. They shouldn’t have, but they did and this built trust between them and their customers.

3. Pricing. Upon getting feedback

from clients that their fees were too high, they decided to subsidize their fees & reduce it to the 1% market rate. Mind you, they are bearing the cost of moving money from different platforms - all of which have fees attached. Curti says customers love the new pricing move.

As of today, ExpressPay has grown from a team of 4 to about 40 and have over 400,000 downloads on iOS and Android. They have grown to be one of Ghana’s most successful startups in less than 10 years and I personally look forward to what they become in the next 10 years.

Also, they are always looking for talented people to join their team. So if you’ve got what it takes, shoot your shot!

Thanks to the Africa’s Business Rockstars @idsconsultinggh podcast where I sourced a lot of this information.

Listen to their podcast and subscribe. Next, I will talk about a startup making waves in the Ghanaian health sector. If you have any companies you want me to profile, please recommend. Like and retweet!