Why We Invested: NOW Money
Looking back on it, the UK mobile banking boom of the mid- to late-2010s was curious. I remember receiving a card, taking it for its first transaction, then — WOW — seeing the payment appear straight away on my phone. It was mind-blowing and so obviously desirable that, when my great uncle asked me one time what it was actually for, I couldn’t give him a coherent answer to save my life.
Elsewhere, it’s a different story. Look further afield, outside the most developed cities of financially sophisticated nations, and it’s not hard to find large groups of people excluded from financial services that we take for granted.
Modern-day Dubai is one such place. There, many migrant workers come to seek a better livelihood. Mostly, this means finding work in unskilled or manual labour, and come payday sending money back to their home country and the family they’ve left behind. For an EU or US national, doing this is a snap — a simple visit to a name brand online remittance service. For these workers, often paid onto salary cards lacking either the right functionality or the appropriate user experience, the outcome is long waits in line at physical remittance houses, eating into the little time off from work they have.
So what’s the issue here? It’s not as though all the individual pieces of functionality don’t exist in the UAE. Xoom and TransferWise are decently set-up operations capable of taking online payment and local banks have their own operations that these services often sit on top of anyway. The accounts are in place, too — where else would people be paid into?
The key isn’t in the what, but the how. To date, there simply hasn’t been a purpose-built, tailor-made, holistic banking service for migrant workers in the MENA region. So far, everything has been reworkings of services built for the wealthy. In the cases where the functionality is in place, the UI/UX layer on top of it has missed the mark. Illiteracy rates are higher than desirable in the target population, and this simply hasn’t been taken into account.
So, what if there was a salary card for migrant workers that was actually built for its target market?
Well, there is. It’s called NOW Money, and we’re proud to say we led the Series A.
Started by exceptional founders Katharine Budd and Ian Dillon, NOW Money is a company that requires tenacity to build. With hindsight, the thesis laid out above might seem obvious, but it’s one that needed foresight to identify, and sheer strength of will to execute. It’s not easy being groundbreaking, and, as fintech founders in many countries all over the world are learning right now, local regulators and incumbents can be highly resistant to change. The work that Kat and Ian have done to get to this point is huge, but it’s just the start.
The NOW Money app is flourishing, with an extensive range of features already in place. There are some ‘simple’ elements like peer-to-peer transactions, airtime top-up, and online payments, but NOW Money also has features that entire companies are built around, such as early access to earned wages. The ‘signature’, of course, is the in-app remittance service, the heart of the business, designed to save its users hours in waiting at exchange houses — at a cheaper price. All of this is built on top of a fully functional bank account, with a UI/UX layer truly designed for the target market, developed for the needs of the customer.
So, to echo the sentiment of my great uncle, what’s it for? The answer is clear: the tens of thousands of hours saved waiting to remit money in 2020, 3 percent more money received per month by families of migrant workers through fairer pricing, and a customer base doubling month-on-month with a goal to include 200k people in the formal financial system by the end of 2021. Oh, and I guess the payment notification that appears on your phone when you buy something. That too.
We at Anthemis Exponential Ventures look forward to supporting NOW Money in the years to come, and to watching the company thrive in the upcoming fintech boom in the MENA region. The world deserves to experience the same mobile banking innovations we’ve seen in Europe and North America, and, if Kat and Ian from NOW Money have their way, that may come about sooner than you think.
