Daring to invent our future
One of the hardest thing about start-up ventures is having to choose. When you look out to a market — especially one as promising as African financial services one– and see endless opportunities, it’s hard not to go after them all. And as a tech entrepreneur, armed with unattackable optimism, it’s so easy to believe that you can write the right code and be everything to everyone.
When I founded MFS Africa a decade ago, the big problem I wanted to solve was interoperability, with two end goals in mind: empowering the African consumer with endless possibilities and enabling scale for a range of services providers. I could so easily picture the promised land: any account can interact with any account, anywhere. I saw my mom in Porto-Novo and imagined a world in which it was as easy to pay her for the honey she sells as it was to make a phone call. I also imagined the tailleuse Camerounaise making fabulous dresses in Douala and collecting payments from her eager clients in Accra or Johannesburg or Washington DC, paying suppliers of fabric in Lagos and zippers and buttons from Shanghai to Paris.
Throughout our journey, MFS Africa’s success has been driven by our ability to focus and execute. So we made hard decisions and honed our core business: connecting mobile money systems, money transfer operators, and banks to our interoperability hub. Along the way, small and medium businesses and start-ups reached out to us frequently — could we connect a new gaming app to mobile wallets in Cameroon and Congo? Could we help an e-commerce site accept payments from Liberia and Malawi? It quickly became apparent that solving these problems wasn’t quite in our DNA. We needed to find a partner. A few weeks after I reached that conclusion, Beyonic’s name came up in a separate discussion. Fast forward to late September 2019 in a conversation about SMEs payment in Africa Beyonic came up again; at that point, I decided to reach out to Luke Kyohere, Beyonic’s founder. The rest of the story has been brilliantly told by The Flip earlier this year.
What does this deal mean?
The story of MFS Africa’s acquisition of Beyonic is exciting for several reasons. First, it paved the way for many other landmark deals in the ecosystem this year — Paystack, DPO, Sendwave to name a few — which reinforce our thesis that we are entering the consolidation phase of the industry. Looking at all these subsequent deals, the significance of the Beyonic acquisition for the ecosystem may get lost. The Global Start-up Ecosystem Report for 2020, which was released in late July, did not feature a single African city in its top 50 ecosystems. Across the globe, a prototypical good exit is modelled on the Silicon Valley exit where a buyer from the US, Europe or Asia buys you out thus validating you and your ecosystem. Even in Africa, where tech entrepreneurs recognise the unique challenges of working on this continent, that is the idea of the perfect exit.
How beautiful it is then to provide another way in the form of the acquisition of an Africa player, by an African player. In these trying times, when many black people around the world are crying for their fair shot at life, it’s worth celebrating that we have provided a concrete proof that we can create our own success, right here at home. That we can be the masters of our destinies. That, as Thomas Sankara would have put it, we have dared to invent our future.
Secondly, both companies share a passion for the continent and digital payment pathways between its people, its businesses and the world. Through this transaction, we are combining our digital payment hub with Beyonic’s digital payments management toolbox to enable seamless transactions across markets and currencies for the underserved SMEs. In practice, it means that a tech company or a social impact enterprise in Kampala that currently makes or receive payment in Uganda using Beyonic services will now be able to do so across MFS Africa’s entire footprint.
Thirdly, this deal is a celebration of the success of bricolage which has been the norm for so long in African innovation. Bricolage is a concept introduced by French Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss as a process of “making do with what is at hand”. It is particularly useful in understanding how strategy works in social innovation. It highlights the importance of combining different existing resources to address new or different problems. It gives us a lens that helps explain how previous African innovations have laid the path for today’s digital payment space and how our work is also laying the foundations for more innovations that will come. It is at the heart of how we are building our business at MFS Africa, and how Luke and his team built Beyonic. The Beyonic business was built on less than $1M — that is bricolage at its best. In the African tech scene, where lack of funding is a chronicle issue, the Beyonic team has proven that you can find a way to get to the goal.
Global best practices on how to build tech ventures are important, but so too is local context; I would argue that mastering local context and being able to bricoler at scale is even more important. Innovations do not come from nothing; they stand on the shoulders of education, previous innovations and lived experience. As Africans who have experienced and understand the challenges of moving money through large distances as individuals and small business operating on the continent, building solutions for these markets is much more than about repurposing ideas that have worked in the global North. By combining what MFS Africa and Beyonic have each been building, I am convinced that we will get the closer to making borders truly matter less for millions of entrepreneurs who are solving relevant challenges of the continent.
Oser inventer l’avenir [1]
Changing how we conceive success is going to be a process, but part of this process is for us, Africa Tech entrepreneurs, to think of the race as a relay rather than a sprint. In that context, our own success is not enough; it has to be relevant to the collective. This means that after our utmost effort, founders must be willing to do what Beyonic has done, by passing on the baton in the right way so that the next person can get the collective closer to our ultimate goal: Prosperity on the continent. From that perspective, Beyonic exit to MFS Africa is to be celebrated by all who care about the progress of the African tech ecosystem. So today let’s celebrate! The struggle will wait for tomorrow.
Originally published on LinkedIn on December 15, 2020
[1]http://www.thomassankara.net/revisiter-thomas-sankara-26-ans-plus-tard-oser-inventer-le-futur/
