Transcript
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Welcome to Scaling with Purpose, the show where we explore what it takes to build companies that aim for commercial success and meaningful impact.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: I'm joined today by Victor Daniyan founder of Near Pays. It's great to have you here. Welcome.
Victor: Thank you so much. My pleasure. It's great to be here.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Thanks a lot. Before we go into the full Near Pays story, I want to start with something practical for the listeners. What is the one thing you have learned about building and sustaining growth that you wish to share with founders that are now in the building phase?
Victor: Great question. This has personally helped me in all of my endeavors I'll just share. The first thing is what I call continuous personal development. It's where you make sure you keep building and working on yourself that you improve on your skills in different segments from your business skills, your leadership skills, to also having great knowledge about your products.
Victor: second thing is that you must be ready to be tough being an entrepreneur and a founder doesn't come easy if not everybody will be a founder or business man or an entrepreneur so you should know that you are going through tough terrain and you should see failure as an opportunity
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yes.
Victor: to learn and even scale up better so do not get discouraged at every point of failure but see it as an opportunity to learn and use that opportunity to leverage on growth
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, beautiful, beautiful. and I don't know if you have heard of Kaizen and its Japanese principle where they say, OK, it doesn't matter where you start.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: As long as you keep improving every day, then you will get somewhere. And I think that is beautiful and that is exactly aligned with what you are saying.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: If you improve every day and you have this learning mentality and also you see failure as a learning opportunity, then you can become better and better each day if you fail or if you succeed. Because I believe people underestimate what you can learn from succeeding too.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: So you can learn from failures and you can learn from successes. And I think, yeah, what what you said is really beautiful. And it also helped me to grow grow my business.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: So thanks for this very valuable advice. Yeah, so we can jump into your story because I'm super excited to hear more about NearPays. and how you started doing Near Pays.
Victor: You're welcome.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: So what is Near Pays actually?
Victor: Thank you. So our core focus at NearPays is to provide access to easy digital payment infrastructure. And we're not just focusing on the elite or the educated.
Victor: We want our products to touch everybody's life. Educated, urban, rural, everyone, small business, large business. so We built a solution around these segments that we had in place.
Victor: So more of having a mentality of financial inclusion from day one.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah.
Victor: And um our core focus was to help businesses receive payment easily, regardless of your status quo. And having that in mind, we are able to build our soft POS solution that helps businesses receive payment with or with without internet connectivity.
Victor: And been deployed in Nigeria, in Ghana, and also serving into some other African countries.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Beautiful. That's beautiful. So actually you're you're making payments accessible. And should I think mainly about the POS side?
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Because you you you said you have the POS system. is is and Is that your main thing or is it like a mobile bank or or something else? Or is it a combination?
Victor: Great. So we started it first from the POS side. There's always a starting point. And then we we got an opportunity to improve on the what we have.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yep. Mm-hmm.
Victor: So regardless, we also have digital payment in account creation, in sending and receiving money across the globe. So we've also built our borders across what we started from in terms of product.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, so, that yeah, very beautiful. I think you're making quite some impact on people's lives because i believe that having...
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: The possibility to access this digital money or digital banking in in general is something that helps you to be included into the economy.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: right You are only part of the global economy if you have a bank account or a way to receive or send digital money.
Victor: Exactly, yes.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: So, yeah, yeah, super, super, super beautiful. And what made you start this? Because you're from ni Nigeria, I think. Right.
Victor: Yes.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah. So as a young boy in Nigeria, was it always your dream to start such a business or how how how did you come extra across this idea?
Victor: Great question. i think I never really wanted to become a full-time entrepreneur. In fact, I had a job. I was working at Nokia under Microsoft, close to roughly about three years or so.
Victor: And I've been in that sector. But along the line, I worked and partnered with a logistic firm in Nigeria that received
Victor: items uh the last mile and first mile logistics i think that's the correct word yeah and they had an issue which was regarding payments people had difficulties making payments
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Oh,
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: yeah. Yeah.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Victor: And because I was supporting them, the issue of payment was affecting us directly because it means without payment, you can handle remittance and it's also a whole lot of issues.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Mm-hmm.
Victor: So while I was trying to be innovative to solve our own local problem in the logistic company, did some research around contactless payment and we were able to come up with a first prototype of our soft POS
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Mm-hmm.
Victor: And it worked. It worked to solve a problem. It was really nice.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, beautiful.
Victor: And, you know, yeah, after we did solve that, I had other logistic companies reach out to me to say, oh, can we use your products? it It worked for you. Possibly might work for us, too.
Victor: And, you know, we didn't even have a solid product, would say, but were able to send it to them. it also worked.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, super cool.
Victor: And after that, yeah. And after that, I thought to myself, oh, this might be a good product.
Victor: Why don't I just refine it and make it better? So for the first time, we took it back. We did some UX and UI upgrade to it. We had an onboarding.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Victor: And we pushed first to Play Store. And other people were able to download. And that was how we started first. It was not an idea from beginning.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Victor: It was solving a problem for one set.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah. Yeah, it's super, super cool, of course, if you come across this type of problem, you solve it, and eat you just...
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: and want to use it yourself and suddenly people come knocking on your door asking you to also become your client actually
Victor: Okay.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: And I think what you are describing here is what a lot of people are experiencing themselves, but they they don't have the vision to turn this into a product. I mean, a lot of times I have been in a situation where I built something and people want it. And I'm like, I didn't productize it, right?
Victor: you
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: I just didn't see the opportunity at that moment.
Victor: been
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: And looking back, And of course, everything is looks cool in hindsight. We can see a lot of things in hindsight because you are your your vision is not blurred by the operational things and the daily things, right? So in hindsight, you can see more. But in hindsight, I would have been able to create a product around it and sell it, probably.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: and And you took the chance. So you saw that it could become a product and you can you can you could commercialize it and and you could put it in the market. yeah I like that.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: So there's one thing I'd like to ask you because, and of course, this grew organically, as I would imagine.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: But when did you when what was the signal for you to decide to productize it? I mean, you had demand. But what what was, let's say...
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: the biggest reason the biggest signal that you should productize this solution you have
Victor: all right great question again so the the major target or the major thing we prioritize was a checklist i would call it a kpi to see if we'd meet that checklist and it was to see if that product was serving a need first actually
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: hmm
Victor: Does it solve a problem? Is it a viable solution to a problem? That was the first one.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: yep
Victor: Then secondly is you could start small, but of course we have focus to scale. So is that product scalable or would it just become or remain a small family solution?
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: yep yep
Victor: It's not scalable. And we looked at it. It was scalable. Thirdly, was it a marketable solution? Would it be difficult to market or not?
Victor: Was it easily marketable? So looking at those three things solved the problem. It's possible to scale it. And it's a marketable solution. We're fine.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, it's it's like the sweet spot of all startups have these three three things, right?
Victor: Yeah.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: and And yeah, then then how did you find the team to do this? Or did you already have the team to to execute the operations?
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: because Because having the idea is one thing, having have a good a good product idea or a good product direction, let's say, is one thing, but creating the product, selling the product, marketing the product is the second.
Victor: Well,
Victor: yeah.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: So how was the team?
Victor: Yeah.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Was it already there or was it like, oh, wait a second, we need some marketeers here.
Victor: Well, at first, I washed so many hats. I was doing a lot of things. I was doing multiple roles. I mean, lot of organizations started like that.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Mm-hmm.
Victor: But you know i along the line, because I had worked in a few industries and then I was also working for a logistical organization, had people who saw value in the product. of them immediately they were ready to join in and being part of the of the of the solution so i had my my first set of would say layer one team members that joined from initial stage and still with the organization till date and uh you know we're able to work that way and after a couple of months another person join up another person comes in and then like that like that and then scale where we are today
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, beautiful.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: So if I would ask you, what is your number one advice on hiring? Because I can see that you probably have hired good people.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Otherwise, if you wouldn't be a if you wouldn't have hired good people, you wouldn't be here, right? But you probably also hired bad people or bad fits.
Victor: Yeah.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: So what would you be your single most important advice on hiring? how how How do you look at hiring?
Victor: Great. So when you're hiring, of course, you have definitions of things you are looking for in an individual from the aspect of educational qualification and maybe experience.
Victor: which are of course very good. But as an organization at Near Pays we have our hierarchy and what comes from first is your attitude to work.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Victor: We put it up above your educational qualification.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: this
Victor: And we look at that and then we talk about your experience, your educational qualification, all those fully under needs. But first, it's your attitude to work. Because I have a perspective personally that I feel you there are things that could be learned and there are things that are difficult to change in an individual. You could learn to become maybe a better fisherman.
Victor: if well guided, but it's difficult to change someone who's an experienced fisherman and has a bad attitude to work, possibly always comes to work late and never wants to change.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Victor: It's more difficult to change that than to teach him how to fish better.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Oh, definitely.
Victor: So, you know, we prioritized that and it has really helped us and guided us to, you know, having better fits for each position we hire.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, interesting. and And do you have like a formal way of defining what skills are learnable and what things are on the attitude side? Because it's it's sometimes easier said than done.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: And some things are in between, right? So do you have some kind of list that you keep track of? Or is that per vacancy that you create a list of skills?
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Attitudes you're searching for? and and And also, how do we interview people to understand how their attitude is?
Victor: Okay, so first we have like a KPI which we also look at in each hiring and we you have a checklist of what we ask these individuals and then we have three levels of interviews that we usually do.
Victor: the checklist gives us insight on your personal behavior or attitude or perspective ideology also so we check your attitude to some things we check your perspective and your ideology because it's also difficult to change the world's ideology
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah. Yeah.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Victor: And those the first three things we look at. And your first interview already tells us if you're going to the next. The first interview is no questions about education, no questions about work. We just want to know you better.
Victor: Tell me a more about you.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: yeah.
Victor: Tell me how you react if you have this issue at work. What would you what would would you do with your teammates? Are you a team person? Are you not a team person? what What's your ideology to towards failure?
Victor: What's your ideology towards success? you know Those are your first questions. Nothing about the job, nothing about accounting or development or programming. that gives you out so if if you succeed that then we cannot take it forward so those have helped us streamline the people we employ and it has always worked always worked perfectly me
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: yeah Beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah, let's say if we want to talk about recruitment, I think we can fill a complete episode about it, right?
Victor: yeah
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Because I personally believe that recruitment is the single most important thing in a business besides sales, right? Because You need people and a company exists of people.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: It's a group of people doing as a certain task. So the differentiator is the people most of the times.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: So another company can copy whatever offer you have, but if they have other people, then they could be, they they they could fail.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: And because you have your people, it succeeds sometimes. So they define quite a large part of strategy. They define quite a large part of operations, execution quality, and so on. It's all people work.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: yeah So what I'm actually interested also in understanding, because you are in Africa, and let's say I'm here living in the Netherlands, and the the the only images I see from Africa are, or we're looking at your beautiful forests,
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: or we are looking at people that are starving and hungry, poor people.
Victor: Thank you.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: So these two images are actually the biggest images, the the images we see the most from Africa. So I'm really curious if you could tell us more about the talent you have there in Africa.
Victor: Well, great. oh I've lived in Africa more than any part of the world. I think maybe more all my life. I've only visited other continents or other countries, but always back to Africa. And I love one thing. I've had opportunities to maybe relocate, but decided not to because I feel that there are important things that we as entrepreneurs could do to make things better.
Victor: But in general, I'll talk about the skill set in Africa. Africa has a lot of resources in terms of human resources.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Victor: If you check out the demographic of um startups around the globe, startups growing very well, you see that Africa is doing a lot, building products that are scaling to Europe, that are scaling to the Middle East, that's going to different parts of the world, and they're doing very well.
Victor: And you check the engineering team behind those products, a lot of them are Africans. So things are changing. People are getting more exposed.
Victor: People are learning good skills and Africa has the resource. i I will build a product in-house without sourcing for talent anywhere world.
Victor: was locally, it was built from the first school to the last, all in-house, no external support.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yep.
Victor: And it works pretty well. And our focus is to scale it. So Africa has the resource. Yes, we have the beautiful, um maybe you could you could come to see the beautiful animals and have time to the safari. Of course, yes. But also there are a lot of resources in terms of human resources in Africa. and It's growing rapidly fast because it's a continent with a very young population who is improving on digital skills, digital IT.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Victor: And I see an opportunity of even having a lot of African founders or African techies, you know, beauty products that will solve global problems in in the nearest future.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, super beautiful. I like to hear to hear this. It makes me it makes me happy and because there's, of course, inequality in wealth.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: And I believe there's no inequality in talent because we have talented people everywhere in the world. And and this talent should also get a podium, let's say,
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: and
Victor: you
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: to to help solve the problems we have in the world. Because let's say we have quite some challenges in the world, especially if we're looking at ai if we're looking at a lot of things that are happening in the world. We need smart people to work on good solutions for us to be able to maintain prosperity in general.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: so i'm I'm happy to see that the world is finding Africa more and more often, also in and the the aspect of talent.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: So that's beautiful. I think also Africans speak English very well. A lot of African countries speak French. So there there there is no language barrier.
Victor: Yeah.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: it's not a huge There is no huge language barrier. Whereas if you look at other countries, maybe, that do have talents, there is...
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: or they might be a language barrier. And you don't see that very often in Africa. And sometimes something bad brings you something good, right? So we have the colonialization of Africa, which is definitely something bad.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: But because of it, the result of it is that Africans were able to speak languages that are attractive for people here.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: So i think I think there's a lot of opportunity. That being said, I'm also curious about the fintech space because normally fintech is a very tough technical space.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: How do you solve the talent issue there?
Victor: Well, so the FinTech, like you've mentioned, it could get very complicated and it has a lot of moving parts, which you always have to stay on your feet.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Victor: In fact, I would say one of the most complicated aspects is the compliance.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Oh, definitely, yeah.
Victor: boro yeah But, yeah, well, in terms of talent, like I mentioned, They have been very good talent or or engineers who can handle products and build very, very good solutions.
Victor: and we've have that We've had the likes of Flutterwave, that's a unicorn, known globally, and most of its engineers are Africans. we've We've seen a few countries in Africa trying to even build a talent city where people can have access to learn and reside within a cluster where you could reside, you could learn, you could also work. A lot of countries are trying to do that. I think Nigeria is trying to do one in Lagos, Nairobi. Kenya is trying to do one. Kigali is trying to one.
Victor: More countries are coming to the light of digital knowledge and acquisition for the youth. so
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Victor: when you're building you you really do not have you know that constraint of having good engineers or good talent so you can handle all of your products there yeah
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Super cool. Super cool. So also on the fin in the fintech space, there are fintech specialists also just available in in Africa because this is something like the the whole world is struggling with, with fintech specialists.
Victor: yeah
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: right that are able to work within the lines of certain compliancy or standards. it is It is quite challenging. Yeah, so about compliancy.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: and and And I'm also interested in in in the beginning because I think as you scale up, you have more power to solve compliancy issues.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: but when you started how did you how did you manage to get compliant how do you did you get licenses
Victor: Oh, that was a tough one.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: yeah right yeah
Victor: Yeah. So FinTech is is iss just circled around regulations and compliance. You have different parties. I think it's one of the most regulated space, possibly globally.
Victor: you You have central banks. You have all the financial regulators, both international and also local. It was a lot. it's not just one or two or three.
Victor: could be up to 10 or 20, depending on your space.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Victor: And you have to be compliant with all of those regulators. So at first, of course, we didn't have the resources. So we had to leverage on partnership. So we had to see how we could partner with an organization to run under that get rid ja their rails until you have the resources you know to stand out.
Victor: And then we can have our own our solution. And it also becomes a bit different when you are now taking a step to scale to more countries. So if, for example, you're just in Nigeria, you're dealing just with Nigeria.
Victor: when you go to ghana you have nigerian ghana when you go to kenya or south africa you have the just so it's it keeps getting bigger as a skill but i think i love what i'm seeing in africa there's been a a a partnership deal with ghana kenya and rwanda having just one compliance
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yes.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Oh, that is beautiful.
Victor: So if you're compliant in Ghana as a financial institution, you have to operate in Kenya and and Rwanda, which is good.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Victor: It makes it simpler, it encourages companies to also scale faster that and creates better business opportunities.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Victor: So hopefully, with maybe in the nearest future, we'll just have to provide just one compliant and then you're good in the whole of Africa, possibly.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, that would be really good. That would be really good. Yeah. So where are you scaling now? are you Are you also trying to enter new countries at the moment?
Victor: Yes, so we are live in Nigeria and in Ghana, currently already scaled into Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda.
Victor: We also have South Africa on the look in the pipeline, but currently we're already almost done with Rwanda and also Uganda.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, beautiful. Right. That sounds like like a great plan. Aren't you afraid, or let's say, i'm afraid is maybe a big word, but what if the full African compliance framework will be done after you enter all these countries? Isn't that spill a spilled effort?
Victor: its Well, I would say as an entrepreneur, I live my life on a lot of uncertainty. I could be thriving in a country and then it has a new precedent and it brings it a totally new role.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Victor: Yeah, so I live on a lot of uncertainty. yeah The only thing is that i try as much as possible to have structures. The structures would keep you if things change. You should also be able to withstand pressure and you could bounce back easily.
Victor: Yeah.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, i know because I'm just teasing you, of course, but
Victor: Thank you.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: so so some people can think in that way that they will be like, okay, wait, let's just wait until the regulations are there and then we can expand in one go over complete Africa so we don't need to spend money on that part.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: and Yeah, so there are pros and cons. and i'm I'm always interested in how people take such a decision.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, beautiful. i think I think it's very valuable. So you have the beginning, you started this product and you started to sell it around in your own network, but then starts the moment that you would expand to the colder network.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: how how how How did you experience this step? Because what I see is that a lot of founders scaling up struggle with that part.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: So they are very able to sell within their current network or from worth to mouth. But if you want to keep scaling, you need to... create new structures or create a new framework or an engine to expand beyond that first network. So how did you experience that part?
Victor: Great. So, from experience, I've noticed that are the hardest time or the hardest group of people to sell a product to are your friends.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Oh, yeah. yeah here
Victor: i could sell solution to a stranger and they're ready to try about my friends. but oh no I know that guy. you sure he can do something cool?
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, they always underestimate you, right?
Victor: Yeah. i
Victor: Of course.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Victor: And, well, I took time to also be part of my sales. Like I mentioned earlier, I wore Savor Hat. And part of the things I did personally was sales.
Victor: Because sales is the engine that that runs everything or most of the things in your organization.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Victor: How about products? You can sell it. It's just, yeah.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Victor: So I took time to be part of sales and I understood some things about sales. The first is that you have to have the structures of the product because having a bad feedback or a bad review changes everything. So you do you do your homework first.
Victor: When you have some level of certainty about the product, then you could go out and sell. And about sales is that if you have the product so good, organic referrals will happen.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Victor: people would become your sales reps without any pay for free.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Definitely.
Victor: They tell the next person, the next person tells you.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Victor: I will understood that and so I made very good use of it. And I also had other partners who support. And the second thing I did was understanding the impact of volumes.
Victor: If I sell to you a payment product, you could possibly do maybe $5,000 transaction in a month, maybe at tops.
Victor: But if I take that same energy and sell to an organization who has a thousand people, I could be talking about maybe 20 million.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Victor: So I understood that fact and were able to iterate the product to also focus on B2B. And that helped us in terms of scaling and also growth.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, exactly. Especially as fintechs is, and your your business model is based on transactions, right? So you need volume. You need volume.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: You don't need big names with low volume. You need whatever company that does a lot of volume.
Victor: Yeah.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, beautiful. Interesting. Yeah, so that's... we We are ourselves mostly in the B2B SaaS. And then we we search for large deals, but low volume, and which is mostly high ticket. And that is a different type of game, I think.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah. And maybe the last technical questions, a technical question here. As you grow, you don't take any decision yourself anymore.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: How do you grow a leadership team in the correct way? What's your take on that? Because in the end, as you grow, you need other people to take important decisions. And the more you grow, the more important these decisions and they can take become.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: So how do you get the right people around you? And how do you grow their leadership
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: power, let's say?
Victor: Good question. I'll start with maybe a sort of like a story. Someone once said, if you want to know you if you have a good team as a founder or a ceo take a one month leave and if you come back and you still meet a functional organization then yes you have a good team but if if after two days everybody's trying to reach you oh things have gone wrong then you know don't have a good team
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Oh, yeah.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Exactly.
Victor: When building an organization, you could start small, which is fine, but when you're talking about scaling, right now we're talking about maybe six, seven countries, I can't be everywhere at the same time.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah.
Victor: I have to delegate, I have to have people who wouldn't manage. So you need to start up that first is that you need to have a company culture. you have, of course, you you have so some institutions in your company. You should be able to pass that on to the next person.
Victor: So if you're a customer, the same way i will interact with you will be the same way the next person will. No difference because we have a culture, which is a foundation.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Victor: And if you have that in place, then you can grow a leadership team. that would do or handle each request or organization challenges or solutions or problems, whatever, is almost the same way you will you do so.
Victor: So, which is very important. You you start doing that from day one. You should have your culture. It's going to be an issue if I go to the Apple store in the US to fix something and I go to another Apple store in maybe Africa and it's totally different, totally different feedback, then there's a problem.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Different, yeah.
Victor: It should be very similar.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, yeah
Victor: Yeah, so you start that early and that helps you scale. You could be everywhere. You could be in 100 places and you're still doing very fine.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: yeah. Yeah, it's very interesting. Back in the days, I started a foundation where gave free education to children. And it it was very successful when we had a couple of locations that were in the region.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: But the more we expanded, the more we started to see things breaking. And this is exactly what happens if you do this wrong, right?
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: So we had we had, because it was closed and we were all in in in one area, I had a lot of influence or or the founding team had a lot of influence in that in that area. And then when we started to expand, you would not be able to run things also there.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: And we found out that the mistake we had made was that we didn't delegate the right decisions. We didn't create a leadership culture good enough to be able to run run all these different yeah yeah departments or locations for us. and and And what you are saying actually is you should start with culture.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: create app processes around this culture. And then if you get leaders, they have something to leave from. So they have a starting point.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: they can take that into another location and then can they run they can run the things in the same way as in the other locations. And I think i think this is this is very important for a lot of founders that are expanding their work to understand that if you are not able to make the decisions or you are not able to be influential into this in in this location,
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: and you need strong people, but you need a strategy on how to enable these people to take decisions. And that is something that's often often forgotten. So it's it's very valuable to hear from you how you have done that.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: and
Victor: Thank you. Well, cool.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Before we close, because I really enjoyed the conversation, and and I just want to hear from you. What is your future perspective? What are you aiming for?
Victor: well cool We started small, which I said earlier, and it's very okay to start small. But our aim is to have global audience.
Victor: We have a blueprint on a few African countries we're scaling to, and it's not just going to stop this. So we've seen ourselves scaling beyond even Africa, being in Europe, being in Asia, and, you know, touch basically every every part of the world. And it's not just about growth because growth, if not done well, it's going to destroy everything but what we are aiming for is to see how can continue providing that value to everyone
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah. Yeah.
Victor: So we have a value that we we provide. We don't just want to dish it in Africa. want you to have a taste of it in Asia. want have a taste of it in the US, wherever you are. And that's our aim, providing same product, more opportunities across the globe. Also part of the the the problem,
Victor: which we are also seeing and seeing how we we could also support to fix is when you talk about cross payment in Africa. A lot of organizations still do that a lot but it's still fragmented and still not done well. It's still expensive There are still delays, there are still challenges, and those are our targets.
Victor: We build it gradually and we're making sure we do things in a very good and unified way. And those are the challenges we'll see that we'll solve on a global standpoint.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, beautiful. I really like that you are very impact focused. And I can i can hear yeah hear that in the way you speak about the future perspective, right?
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: So I like that a lot. And if people are listening, what's how can they help you in your journey to achieve such an impact?
Victor: you
Victor: Great. So, like I mentioned, we're starting here and then we're going forward. I haven't lived so much outside of of Africa.
Victor: So, of course, we need mentors. We need people to guide us because products are different in every environment. There are environmental differences. You know, there are people's perspectives to different needs, different solutions.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Victor: So we need mentors to guide us, we need partners to work with us, and that will really do us some good because time is very important. If we do it the wrong way, we waste a lot of time and resources, but if you have people to guide us, we save that. So that's one of the most important things.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, interesting. And partners, what kind of partners? I want to go very specific, so like lets let's let's make it a call out.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Okay.
Victor: Of course, we also want people who who are ready, possibly could join our board of directors, know, partners in that light who have experience in the finance space in their region.
Victor: And we are pretty much investors also.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, definitely.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, yeah, beautiful. Good to hear that. And if they want to get into contact with you, how do they do that? Is that on your LinkedIn page? Because we we spoke through LinkedIn, of course.
Victor: yeah
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: What is the best way to get in touch?
Victor: Sure, you could just go straight to my website, victordaniyan.com
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Mm-hmm.
Victor: You have my LinkedIn, my Twitter, on my email, whatever. Everything you have access, whichever means is comfortable, you can reach out to me from there.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Perfect.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: Yeah, perfect. Yeah, so for for our listeners, Victor is a very approachable. so So, let's follow him on his journey. I want to thank you a lot, Victor.
Mohamed Alkaduhimi: And, yeah, hopefully we will have a lot of these chats in the future. Let's keep in touch.
Victor: Thank you. Thank you so much to everyone. Thank you.
