Starta Founder Spotlight: Richmond Ogigai, Founder of WallX
Richmond has built a financial technology company that provides secured and fast payment solutions and tailor-made business tools for individuals and small businesses.
Q: Tell us a little bit about yourself, where you’re from, and the experiences that led you to starting WallX.
A: My name is Richmond Ogigai, and I’m the cofounder of WallX Africa. I’m originally from Lagos, Nigeria. I started out building WallX because of a real situation that took place at some point in 2019. I had seen firsthand the experiences of small business owners when it comes to payments and how their businesses eventually die out because they don’t have the basic tools or knowledge to build out their businesses. 57% of first time customers who experience delayed and failed payments may never return to the store, which begins to slow growth.
For example, things like smart digital payment tools, record keeping, hiring, and sales management, are still very much done in a very manual way, and they end up running your business down. Customers of these SMB’s are also frustrated because they have to wait for a very long payment confirmation time. I experienced these things firsthand. I knew that these were all solvable issues.
I started my professional career working in a system integration company called Dimension Data (a leading global technology company) as an end-user support engineer on various OEM solutions. At some point, I was seconded to an investment bank called Rand Merchant Bank, where I worked as the Lead Infrastructure Engineer. I saw how the investment in technology can leapfrog an organization to become a market leader. I witnessed how the bank took a lot of pride in driving innovations through deploying cutting-edge technology. This was amazing!
I moved on from Rand Merchant Bank and went back to Dimension Data, where I eventually became a Service Delivery Manager, managing some of the IT activities and relationship between Dimension Data and its enterprise clients. I eventually became the Head of the Small and Medium Enterprise business division. I have over fifteen years of experience in technology, finance, banking, infrastructure and marketing.
In June 2018, I launched a SaaS product-led company called Enov8 with a few partners, and we built a product to help corporate organizations and real estate companies manage physical access and leveraging data to develop complex access-based integrations. With that product, we were able to track not just visitors who access a building but also business intelligence data-sets that provide analytics that were useful for the business to make informed decisions. I ran that company for 18 months and had a successful exit, which I’m very proud of.
What does success look like for WallX in terms of your customers? How do you help your customers and how do you change their lives and the businesses of your clients?
For us, success is to see that our customers’ businesses are growing on a daily basis. Number one, we want to see small businesses being able to grow in terms of their revenue and attract more customers.
We want to see our customers become financially included. In Africa today, nearly 60% of businesses and individuals are financially excluded. They don’t have access to financial services. For us at WallX, we’ll be excited to see that our merchants, our individuals, last mile agents, and partners interact with our product and are able to grow their business, generate more revenue, reduce their customer churn rates, and, of course, they are able to access more financial tools that can give them access to things like micro lending and other tailor-made SMB tools.
What have been some of the challenges and successes that you’ve had as a startup founder at WallX?
With respect to the challenges in building out any business, especially in the industry where we play, and in the country where I’m from, you have to deal with things like regulation. Regulation is a big deal which is also a good thing to control bad actors in the sector as well. You want to be sure that you stay compliant, build-out secure infrastructure and put the customer-first approach in your operations. You are not doing things that are outside of the regulatory framework that is instituted by the Apex Bank, in this case the Central Bank. It’s a bit difficult sometimes when you are building a technology that could be solving real problems but it has to be aligned to regulation. Another obstacle is cybersecurity, because we are playing in an industry where we are dealing with money and data movements. In some cases, you don’t want to be exposed to some kind of breach or cyber fraud when you are creating some kind of financial services. You want to be sure that you are aligned with the topmost security protocols that technology can provide, which can be very expensive both in human capital and technology infrastructure. Those are some of the challenges that we have seen and are overcoming gradually. Thanks to Open Banking. We are learning and we are also trying to obscure some of our internal resources to be able to get very familiar with what is happening in the market today so that we stay relevant.
I very happy that we are able to interact very closely with our consumers. I’m very consumer-focused because I came from that background of great customer service. The secret sauce for a sustainable business is getting honest feedback from your customers about the service they are receiving. I mean, that’s one thing to celebrate, like the saying goes, “feedback is a gift”. They could be small, but they are always impactful.
You’re obviously doing something really important for African small businesses. Can you explain a little bit about why you took your business to New York and to Starta?
As much as we are focusing on the African market, Starta has given up the opportunity to possibly scale strategically. That’s a good thing for us because it gives us a wider opportunity to see what the market really looks like in North America.
We are able to learn, find product-market fit, and experiment. We have room to fail, to get the mentorship that we need, get the exposure that we require, and speak to the excellent coaches that Starta provides us. We are currently working to see how we can introduce our product into the SMB community market. Being a part of Starta Accelerator is an exciting thing for us and we do not take it for granted because it exposes us to a very wide range of opportunities.
Today, we are even talking with a few USD debit/credit card and payment partners. We wouldn’t have been able to access them if we’re not in an accelerator like this.
Can you talk a little bit about your team, the company that you’ve built and the company culture that you foster at WallX?
I’m blessed with a very good team today. We’re a very lean team of 15 and growing as we see the demand. Today, there are more technical software engineers than non-tech employees, which is more like the core of what we do today. We have a team that is passionate and believes that they can also build their own dreams and the future that they want for themselves. We have an advisory team of over 35+ years of combined domain experience that is helping us shape the vision, guiding us to be able to maneuver in the industry. We built a culture that is very inclusive, that allows everyone to express themselves and also contributes to the value that would make us a unicorn someday. We’ve made sure that people are happy with their job, get compensated, remunerated for the value that they are adding to the company, and creating a balanced system.
Where do you see WallX in three years? What is the long term vision for your company?
The vision we have for WallX is to build a company that will outlive us and that simply means that we are in it for the long haul. It’s not about five years, it’s not about ten years, not about twenty years. It could be one hundred years. We’re working to see that we continue to innovate around this space. How do we do that? We’re investing our time in research and development so that we can continue to build out the products and services we’re offering today starting from what we have currently in the market.
We want to make sure that we listen more to our customers and begin to bring in more financial products into what we have. We hope to provide a financially inclusive infrastructure and tools for African and diaspora fintechs to build successful products on and launch quickly to create impact around their space. We hope to see this materialize in years to come.
As a founder, what motivates you? Where do you find the joy in the process? Why is this something that you are pursuing for a second time?
I think everybody has a gift to build and execute an idea. I believe everything in life is about the seeds of ideas and finding platforms to express them. An idea is… just an idea, it is what you make out of it that becomes a vision which drives you on a journey that you may have no clue as to what the outcome could be. With over fifteen years of experience, there are still a lot of things that I am learning and unlearning.
It’s not enough to say you are passionate about what you are doing. It’s also about the challenges that come with it, because there is no doubt there are challenges associated in building a startup company. One of the things that will keep you there is some of the experiences you’ve gathered, the passion that initiated the idea of trying to start a business and the possibilities that can come out of it in the future. When I walk into the office every day, I try to set daily goals. I ask questions like: What am I going to be doing today? What value am I going to add? These elements form my daily decisions.
You can learn more about WallX here!
About Starta Accelerator
Starta Accelerator is a NYC-based soft-landing program designed to help international startups scale their US market presence and raise capital. Our Spring 2023 cohort is deep into the program and we are all gearing up for our upcoming Demo Day on June 1st. Join us nearly as twenty international startups pitch their companies to industry experts and investors.
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