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South Africa’s Revio allows businesses to connect to multiple payment methods and reduce failures • TechCrunch


Three out of 10 payments in Africa failed, according to the report. The factors behind this range from fragmented payments and invalid cards to inactive accounts and higher contention rates; they appear annually resulting in a $14 billion loss in recurring revenue for digital businesses across the continent.

These problems are sure to increase as digital payments in Africa continue to grow, 20% year-on-year, according to several reports. And while portals and aggregators have made it easier for businesses to accept multiple payment methods, there are still some solutions to aggregating them for the sake of necessity and dealing with payment errors. arising from each platform. That’s where Revioa South African API payments and debt collection company, participated. Fintech that makes it easy for businesses across Africa to connect to multiple payment methods and manage payment errors is announcing that it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding.

Fintech investor Speedinvest led the round, with participation from Ralicap Ventures, The Fund and Two Culture Capital. Some of the angel investors also participating include payments and revenue recovery specialists from Sequoia, Quona Capital and Circle Payments, according to a statement shared by the startup.

Revio was founded by Ruaan Botha in 2020. As a professional who has worked in South Africa’s banking and insurance industries for more than a decade, Botha decided to launch Revio after seeing how much manual time and effort businesses put in. to attract customers for outstanding and unpaid payments. It is clear that very few companies have meaningfully invested in revenue recovery. When asked over 25 customers where they would invest $1 if they had to fix their payment system, most of them said they would spend at least 90% of that money managing payment errors and customer churn.

“We have a debit order that is the largest recurring payment method in South Africa. But the moment businesses want to start adding different payment methods to meet the needs of their customers, it’s hard for them to do so,” Botha told TechCrunch in an interview. “And it is precisely because of the disconnect between banks, new fintechs and payment aggregators that it is also difficult for businesses to collect recurring revenue on an ongoing basis. So with Revio, we want to make it super simple for businesses to connect every payment method they need, not just in South Africa but in the rest of Africa and globally.”

Botha features three corporate executives: Chief Commercial Officer Pieter Grobbelaar, a foreign leader at Flutterwave; Technology Director Kyle Titus, who has experience working with fintech and venture studios; Product Manager Stefan Grieselwho has more than 8 years of experience in fintech products; and executive director Nicole Dunnan operator and venture builder who has worked with many startups in Africa.

Dunn, on a call with TechCrunch with Botha, said Revio aggregates and coordinates a variety of payment methods in Africa including cards, bank transfers, debit orders, mobile money, vouchers and QR code. The platform collects and settles payments in more than 40 markets through payment service providers such as vibration wave, salary stack, Ozow and Sew. Some of its features, in addition to multiple payment methods, include smart payment routing, automated payment workflows, auto-withdrawal, and real-time analytics and reporting.

Managing Director Ruaan Botha

In more than a year of operation, Revio has received more than 50 customers and processed thousands of transactions monthly. They range from large scale businesses to medium market businesses and fast growing scaling companies that are related to businesses with high recurring revenue and transaction volume, often need multiple payment methods in many markets. These are typically insurance companies, telecommunications companies, retailers, subscription software or media, property leasing or financing businesses, and alternative lenders.

“We then also built orchestration capabilities so that we can reduce checkout errors through things like smart transaction routing, smart retrying to make sure customers don’t get hit,” says Dunn. debt, especially recurring payments”. “And then what sets us apart is that we serve businesses with recurring revenue instead of regular e-commerce platforms.” She added that Revio has more than 100 customers waiting to be referred.

Payment coordination is becoming increasingly important in today’s world, where businesses operate in multiple countries and need a wide range of payment methods to do so. While several such platforms already exist in the US and Europe to handle this heavy lifting through a unified payments API like Primer, fast and Zoobusinesses in developing markets are starting to see identical platforms like Revio and are based in Egypt hash money occupies a central position on different areas.

On the subject of competition and how it stands out, Revio claims that it is the first African payments platform to focus on payment errors and revenue recovery. “We also have more functionality and coverage in the sub-Saharan Africa context than other platforms on the market,” added Dunn. Either way, the global payment coordination market is reportedly growing at a rapid pace (according to a study, market size expected to reach $6.52 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 24.5% from 2022 to 2030) and there is just too much space for newer platforms to grab market share – and incumbents like Revio will expand their reach.

That’s one reason why this two-year-old fintech company has raised this capital: moving into new markets inside and outside Africa, expanding its team in the process, and launching products. new to its growing clientele.

“I would say the investment in use is double,” says Botha. “One is to gain access to more strategic skills around data and machine learning to help us develop and drive better engagement with our customers, understand why they fail, and how to achieve higher rates. better response rate. With the data from there, we can start testing in some of the core markets in Africa. We want to operate in about 13 African countries over the next 18 months, but focus on three or four major markets. And then there’s enough traction that we can reach other emerging markets like Latin America.”

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