Flex is live!
There are over 40 million SMEs in Nigeria, which according to PWC contributes 48% to our national GDP, account for 96% of businesses as well as 84% of our employment.
Despite how crucial this cohort is to our economy, it's of grave concern that over 50% of them are expected to die before their third birthday.
Our Journey
We then embarked on a journey to stem the tide of this astonishingly high mortality rate for Nigerian SMEs and innovate for their longevity. We want to ensure more and more Nigerian SMEs can continue to provide the income and jobs that sustain the vast majority of Nigerians.
After many months of talking to hundreds of SME owners, investigating and testing many value hypothesis. We discovered that the fundamental cause of this high mortality rate among SMEs is Poor financial management. This has hampered their access to working and growth capital, insurance and ultimately cut short their survival.
We took out time to see why existing solutions were unable to solve this problem and made the following discoveries
Low Financial literacy
Most of the existing solution requires a high level of financial literacy(and financial literacy rate currently stands at 20% among SMEs).
No mobile-first solution
Existing solutions aren’t entirely operable on mobile devices and need a PC/laptop at some point but with SME’s being mostly mobile this is prohibitive.
Cost of existing solutions
Their current cost is beyond the affordability range of many SMEs
Our Solution
With all this in mind, we set out to build a solution that scaled over all the aforementioned issues, so we could reach millions of SMEs, and remove all barriers to better financial management.
The Fruit of all our labour is Flex.
Flex is an easy-to-use expense management solution that helps SMEs: control, track, automate and gain insights on their expenses.
With Flex, business owners will spend 86% less time doing their expenses, can plug all the leaks in their expenditure while gaining actionable insights on their spending habits from our AI algorithm.
“Businesses that adopt Expense management software see a 598% return on their investment”
Forrester economic report, 2017
Flex leverages SMEs’ digital literacy which currently stands at over 86%, to deliver a product that fits perfectly into their mobile and digital lifestyle.
This will be our first of many releases as we continually work to meet the needs of our users and drive financial inclusion among SMEs. Putting into consideration how COVID-19 has put not only peoples’ health but the global economy at peril, now more than ever is the time to provide SMEs with a proper financial management solution giving them a fighting chance against this kind of black swan events and other demerits that arise from poor financial management. We as a team have taken precautions and made preparations to ensure we’re able to support SMEs in these unique times
Conclusion
We are excited to have embarked on this critical and exciting journey to democratize access to financial management for SMEs. We are also honoured to have received the peoples choice award at Accion Venture labs company builder demo day where we also emerged overall winner,
Are you a business owner and would like to put an end to all-expense related frustrations?
DOWNLOAD NOW
Please tell your friends, loved ones and acquaintances who are business owners that Flex is here to take all their expense related worries away.
Here are what the business owners in our beta testing group have to say about Flex:
“Flex has made creating and monitoring our lean startup budget very seamless. At a glance, I know what we are spending on and how I can optimize our spending”
Abisoye — Openemployement.ng.
“I love how easy it is to use. The signup process was very smooth. I have tried other expense tracking apps and I always had difficulties. Flex is the best app I have used, so far”
Roli — Kaizen Pharmacy
“Fantastic interface, sweet user experience and I love the reporting format”
Adeola — Schoolphix
We look forward to your feedback and suggestions.
Stay Safe.
