ClickPesa has added Chris Low, an international banking, financial inclusion, digital transformation has joined into its advisory team in a move set to help grow the firm.
ClickPesa offers a toolbox with payment solutions making it easier to receive and make payments for your business and sees the addition of Chris as an advantage.
The emerging markets and risk management practitioner, with more than 30 years of proven financial services industry delivery in the UK, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, was most recently the Group CEO at Letshego Holdings Limited, one of Botswana’s largest public listed and multinational groups, with consumer and micro-finance banking subsidiaries operating across eleven countries in West, East and Southern Africa.
Prior to Letshego, Chris worked for Arthur Andersen, Goldman Sachs, Standard Chartered and National Bank of Kuwait – during his 19 years with Standard Chartered, his roles included CEO, India and Nepal, CEO Tanzania; GM/CEO East Africa/Kenya and CEO South Africa. At NBK he was Deputy CEO for their international businesses.
Chris read Zoology at St Peters College, Oxford and his outside interests include art and antiques, travel, sustainability and charitable fund raising.
ClickPesa was founded in 2019 with a goal to simply facilitate transactions for businesses in Africa. ClickPesa aims to help businesses in Africa reduce costs, friction in the transaction process and open up the continent to global business.
ClickPesa offers a platform that unifies payments services in one platform for businesses in emerging markets. It helps local businesses perform better by increasing productivity and profitability. Internationally, ClickPesa simplifies the way companies can do business in emerging markets. The platform connects with existing mobile wallets and bank accounts to facilitate payments.
In May, Tanzania’s ClickPesa partnered with Dutch Payment facilitator Ai2 to provide farmers in the agriculture and horticulture industry in Tanzania a quicker and cheaper way to receive payments from buyers in Western Europe.
The partnership was to create substantial value for farmers based in Tanzania enabling them to collect payments directly from buyers in the European market, without using middlemen. In addition, it allows for faster settlement and a lower fee structure compared to using traditional banks.
The collaboration will result in an improvement of working capital. ClickPesa and Ai2 support direct business between farmers and buyers without using a middleman, which saves cost and time. Agriculture is a large economic sector in Tanzania, representing 29.1 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and almost three-quarters of the productive workforce.
Seamless process
The process is simple: the farmer signs up under ClickPesa and indicates it uses Ai2 for payment collection in Europe. The farmer uses the e-invoice service of ClickPesa to create an invoice stating the delivered products that will be sold. After sending the invoice, Ai2 sends the invoice to the buyer. The payment will be collected and a farmer will receive the money within a week converted into Tanzania Shilling (TZS) against a competitive rate into the farmer’s bank account in Tanzania.
