Rehive’s vision, mission and strategy

Rehive’s mission is to help founders and businesses to rapidly build, launch and scale their fintech businesses. We don’t take it lightly writing about this topic as it is the heartbeat of our company and the community we‘re creating.

Our story

Michail and I built our first fintech product together in 2014. In February 2015 we joined Boost VC and launched ZapGo, an app for easily buying bitcoin in South Africa to pay friends and shop online. At the time e-commerce sites started accepting bitcoin and we heard that people in Africa don’t have credit cards, so it seemed like a great idea! We started our journey because we were inspired by the technology and vision behind Bitcoin— everything about it was (and still is) overwhelmingly fascinating. We had nothing to lose and a world to conquer building something awesome that we believed could change everything.

But little did we know how hard it is to start a fintech business. It turns out large corporates and banks also struggle in building and launching new products. We’ll share more about the challenges we had to overcome in future blog posts, but in the end, one of the biggest obstacles is simply getting started. Fintech founders and corporate business owners quickly find themselves in a chicken-and-egg predicament:

• you need money to build your product,
• it will take long to make money because of low revenue margins, so you start meeting with investors or business sponsors to ask for funding,
• 3 months later you realize investors want to see traction and/or some rockstar credentials,
• you know you need to build a basic product to get traction, and finally
• to build a product you conclude you need money.

In the end, the problem is you don’t start.

After launching ZapGo we saw interest from other startups and businesses wanting to use our wallet system to launch their own products all over the world. We’ll share more about these companies and their stories in the coming weeks. The point is, we got inspired by the question: “What if we made our technology available for others to easily build fintech apps, where they don’t have to go through the pain of building everything from scratch?”

We looked at over 20 fintech use cases and quickly came to the conclusion that roughly 80% of the backend features for most fintech apps are always the same. Rehive Platform is like lego blocks for building a fintech product, making it easy to mix and match a core set of features that caters to almost all fintech use cases. Rehive Extensions (currently in Beta) is a marketplace for adding custom features or plugins, built by third-party service providers and developers.

Hard questions

We’re passionate about working on technology and can see how it is valuable to our clients, but that is not enough. We believe it is important to answer these three questions:

1. Why is fintech innovation important to the world?
2. What can we do today to help make a difference?
3. How do we plan to do it?

Together, after months of work, we drafted our vision, mission and strategy statements in an effort to answer these questions and use it as a compass for our journey ahead.

Vision (Why?)

We believe an open financial system will bring more freedom to the world.

Mission (What?)

Make it easy to start a fintech business.

Strategy (How?)

At a high level, Rehive has a three-step strategy:

• Build and launch Rehive Platform for making it easy for anyone to get started and scale fintech products without the need to build everything from scratch.
• Launch Rehive Extensions, a marketplace for Fintech Services that can easily be activated and strung together to meet specific fintech needs.
• Create Rehive Ecosystem, a community of developers, entrepreneurs, and enterprises who all work toward a common goal.

Up next

Over the next few weeks we’ll unveil more content including:

• fintech use cases,
• starter guides,
• founder interviews,
• company announcements,
• and more.