Fleet fuel payment market a gap for app
Entrepreneurs spot opportunity in their field, and expand across Africa
PAYMENT24 founders Shadab Rahil and Nolan Daniel have steered their start-up firm to phenomenal success since starting their company from scratch after seeing a gap in the fleet fuel payment space.
Rahil and Daniel are joint chief executives of Payment24, a fleet fuel management mobile app, and aim to be one of the top three players in the fuel payment space within the next five years.
Rahil said the firm was established about five years ago, when Daniel and Rahil had both worked for a large oil company for 10 years, looking after the fuel payment systems.
“Our job was to roll out fuel payment systems for our employer.
“While looking at the 30-year-old system we were using, we realised we were just selecting the same payment system, and saw a gap in the market.
“We left our jobs and started Payment24, developing it from scratch,” said Rahil. Using the latest technology, they found a viable product running towards the end of 2014, beginning of 2015, an their first small customer to trial the app.
Rahil said since then the firm had covered some distance.
Initially the sector was challenging as it was dominated by three or four big players, such as the banks and some listed companies involved in the industry, he said.
“They are the dinosaurs of the industry, I would call them, because the fuel card industry has not evolved since the 1980s.
“We decided to disrupt, and we were successful.”
Rahil said their clients included some large local petroleum companies, as well as some multinationals.
Daniel said it was not easy doing business across the continent.
Pan-African business expansion was challenging in terms of cross-border payments and red tape. But despite the challenges, Payment24 was expanding across Namibia, Kenya, Ghana, Botswana, Nigeria and Mozambique.
He said the company’s growth was supported by being selected as one of 36 to participate in the international 500 Startups Global Seed Accelerator programme in San Francisco last year.
“This programme gave us an opportunity to establish links in the North American market, and to conduct research that confirmed product-market fit in the US,” said Daniel. “We started with no employees and today we have 25 people, all local, and this is a completely South African-built company,” he added.
Rahil said the challenge in South Africa was the perception around start-ups.
“For some reason it is a bad perception here. If you say you are a start-up in the US, in San Francisco, that is not a negative, it is a cool thing. That means you are agile, you think on your feet, you will deliver the solution quicker and better,” he said.