Our African adventure started back in 2019, when we travelled to Lagos, Nigeria to enable digital transformation of one of the fastest-growing betting companies in Africa. We wrote about it in detail on our blog. Owing to this project, Salesforce recognized us as a partner for Sub-Saharan Africa, with special focus on Nigeria. Here we said that “it was worth creating this campaign, which will probably be the first of many more to come” – and we were right! 😊

In 2020, We have established Joint Venture company in Lagos, Nigeria with our partners Tru Infotech Group. Tru InfoTech Group has a presence in 9 countries all over the world.

Flutterwave is an African fintech startup founded in 2016, which develops B2B payment solutions mainly for small and medium-sized businesses. With this platform, users can do business and trade in the global market directly from Africa, which strengthens the local entrepreneurial community, while at the same time (seemingly traditional) Africa connects with the postmodern digital economy. They claim that their solution is the easiest way of making or receiving payments from customers across the world, and it includes tools for both online and offline sales.

Flutterwave’s founders, Nigerians Iyinoluwa Aboyeji and Olugbenga Agboola, decided to operate in Africa but to locate their headquarters in San Francisco. The logic behind their decision is perfectly clear. They wanted to use the best of both worlds – work on scaling business and developing the platform and at the same time have access to the world’s largest investment funds. Flutterwave has also recently announced its partnership with PayPal in order to enable their users across 50 African countries to receive money via PayPal, which up to now hasn’t been possible for most countries on the continent.

It came as no surprise to us that they’ve recently secured an investment of as much as $170 million. What’s more, it couldn’t have happened any other way considering that in 2019 alone they processed 107 million transactions worth $5.4 billion.

Finally, when you look at all these figures, investments and the number of users, it’s immediately clear why Flutterwave decided to buy a Salesforce license and take their customer relationship to the next level.

As we’ve mentioned in the introduction, our first big client from Africa was BetKing, a betting company from Nigeria, for which in 2019 we implemented the following Salesforce solutions: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Live Chat and Social Studio. During that process, we managed to integrate a complete profile of our client in a single place (360-degree customer view). We reduced the number of unresolved partnership requests to zero and created omni-channel for all communication channels so that the user support team answers all messages in one place. The end result was that the project paid off after only 10 months. The client still processes partnership (franchise) requests with a 100% efficiency, has a much more efficient user support and faster complaint resolution, as well as real-time marketing reports and user support results. They are, however, most proud of end-users’ satisfaction which increased by 36%.

The achieved results, along with the fact that we were recognized by Salesforce as partners for Sub-Saharan Africa, were good enough recommendation for Flutterwave to contact us. After a lengthy and detailed discussion on goals and possibilities, it was decided that Joint Venture Kameleon Solutions and Tru InfoTech would take on the task of implementing the Salesforce solution, to the mutual satisfaction.

More specifically, we will be implementing solutions in sales and user support (Sales Cloud and Service Cloud). In order to generate leads and increase sales, our main tasks will be to unify all user data in a single place (360-degree customer view), enhance productivity and efficiency for the purpose of scaling business, build relationship with users, automatize repetitive processes so that the sales team and user support could devote their time solely to customers, and finally to use the potentials of artificial intelligence.

Although we won’t be traveling to Africa this time, because we have a team on the ground (Lagos, Nigeria), we are looking forward to starting work on this intercontinental project with the company whose value is estimated at over $1 billion.

For years now, FinTech companies have been dramatically changing the financial service market by offering users, tired of slow bank procedures and waiting in lines, solutions which are innovative, cheap, useful and extremely easy to use.

Digital transformation has become a necessity, customers’ expectations have evolved, while new technologies provide accessibility and product/service delivery with previously unimagined efficiency. Don’t forget that in 2020 the pandemic significantly raised customers’ expectations about digital possibilities that companies offer. Sitting at home, users got accustomed to fast, personalized service (accessible in just a few clicks) when purchasing clothes, streaming services and food. It’s only reasonable to suppose that good shopping experience raises users’ expectations and thus makes them expect to get the same quality from other industries.

What does this mean for the financial sector? What banks and other companies from the financial sector could do is think about the possibilities of simplifying customer journey for their current and new clients by using modern tools and solutions, instead of turning their heads and saying “All right, but that’s entertainment industry, what does it have to do with us?”. The message for all financial service providers for 2021 is to focus on creating customer experience which would take users to the final goal/conversion in as few steps as possible. According to Rohit Mahna, Salesforce’s financial expert, consumers never dream about finding a perfect lender, or applying for a loan and getting a mortgage – no, they dream about owning a home. This might be the last chance for traditional financial sector to modernize, respond to the needs of new generations and put the customer in the center of its campaigns.

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