Poketi is a Ugandan cross network payment startup founded in 2014 by Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship program fellow, Ivan Mugere.
According to Poketi, mobile money is available in 93 countries with 271 services. Yet it is impossible to move money between Telecom Network wallets. Where such a functionality exists, its expensive. Poketi is able to facilitate transfer of money between partner wallets - M-Pesa, MTN, Airtel, Paka Cash among others.
Poketi allows its users buy airtime for any registered phone number on any network using a mobile money account of any given network as well as make bill payments. It also allows them to send Money to any registered phone number using a mobile money account of any given network. Further more, it allows you to withdraw your mobile money from any mobile money agent, even the ones with float on other networks. It also allows you to receive money from abroad instantly on mobile money. Lastly, SACCOS/Investment Clubs can do financial transactions on the app with their members; deposits, withdraws, savings, bulk payments.
Infosis is the parent company for Poketi. The startup has managed to raise funding locally from a series of shareholders in cash as well as in kind. Some of the funding came from Ivan Mugeere (with an injection of $100,000), James Bwire (with an estimated injection of $120,000) and Pascal Ojijo (with an estimated injection of $250,000). We also understand that one of the shareholders provided a building where the startup currently operates from in Ntinda - though they declined to reveal further details.
One of the key successes for the startup is that it grossed revenue of $250,000 in 2016 and is looking at a medium target of hitting at least $100,000 in daily net profit by 2022. They are also targeting at least 1000 monthly app downloads by close of December 2017 as well as at least 1500 transactions a day by July 2017. We were unable to establish the current status of the app downloads as well as daily transactions.
The team is currently made up of Ivan Mugeere (CEO, Founder), Stefan Trifunovic (International Business Development Manager), Jeremiah Mwanja (Business Development Manager), Keneth Attria (Software engineer), Joseph Tabajjiwa (Senior software engineer), Brian Odwongo (Accountant) Johnathan Kinyi (Sales person), Madina Kitimbo (Sales Person) and Kyle Duncan (Public Relations Manager).
The startup has been able to bag a couple of partnerships with local telecom giants MTN and Airtel as well as the Tony Elumelu owned multinational United Bank of Africa (UBA) - which Ivan Mugere considers the most powerful they have so far. The UBA partnership is mainly to be used for remittances. One of the reasons Poketi secured the UBA partnership could be because Ivan Mugere is a Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Program fellow.
Poketi is currently seeking $1,000,000 in funding for which the return on investments are up to 30% per year for debt financing. For private equity, they offer 20% of the company’s Premium/permanent shares.
Some of the challenges Poketi is facing are include competition from commercial banks such as Stanbic, Ecobank, UBA, insurance companies such as NIKO, UAP, TransAfrica as well as telecom Company's mobile wallets, such as MTN, Airtel, Safaricom etc as well as forex Bureau Exchange and Microfinance Institutions.
The other challenge is the fact that Poketi has to pre-buy everything that customers have to use. This, Ivan says, means they have to have a big cash bank to facilitate operations. Lastly, Ivan says that investors in Africa always ask more for less which demotivates the founders.
Download the Poketi App here.
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