Earnipay secures $4m to provide flexible, on-demand salary access to employees
Canaan, Paystack’s CEO among investors
IN AFRICA, OVER 70 PERCENT OF THE WORKFORCE, estimated at 500 million people, is paid every 30 days, while they live from paycheck to paycheck.
But reports have shown that the 30-day pay cycle has led to 40 percent of the workforce or employees living in an unending debt cycle as they struggle to match their income to their daily expenses, emergencies and opportunities. This has led to the development of a platform with a solution to help capture the huge on-demand salary access opportunity in Africa.
Founded in 2021 by NonOriginal so Onwuzulike to improve employees’ financial wellbeing, Earnipay, a financial technology solution has closed a seed round of $4million to provide flexible and on-demand salary access to income-earners and also accelerate the development of its technology platform to serve large enterprise employers.
The funding round was spearheaded by fintech heavyweight investors from the local and international space. Canaan led the round with the bid to scale African earned wage access solution, with participation from XYZ Ventures, Village Global, Musha Ventures, Ventures Platform, Voltron Capital and Shola Akinlade, the chief executive of Paystack.
Earnipay, targeting employees across Africa, launched in January 2022 after it had been in development and beta testing since September 2021. The platform uses technology to offer employees the opportunity to access their earned salaries into their accounts flexibly, in realtime and interest-free and it also partners with employers to seamlessly integrate with their payroll systems to offer its services to employees, who can then track and withdraw their accrued salaries via the app.
Earnipay charges employees a processing fee of N250 or N500 for this access and there is no payback, no interest charge because employees are accessing what they have worked for.
Having served over 20 businesses, outsourcing firms and HR solution providers in Nigeria, including Eden Life and Thrive Agric, whose employees have used the app to access their salary over 1,000 times, indicating a strong demand for the solution, the platform, in its beta state, allows businesses complete oversight and set limits for the percentage of salaries employees can withdraw each month.
With Earnipay, employers offer more financial well-being support to their employees, which in turn enable them to attract and retain top talent in an increasingly competitive employment market. In addition to on-demand salary, Earnipay provides financial education for employees to improve their financial literacy with a goal to enable them to make better financial decisions.