Africa Gets a New Wallet
Innovator andy Khawaja Leads MobILe PayMents exPansIon
Andy Khawaja’s smartphone houses photos of himself with Barack Obama, Larry King, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, and Pope Francis. The founder and CEO of Allied Wallet speaks five languages, and hob-knobs in Doha and Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi and Beverly Hills. Friends and clients call him Dr. Andy. With a global perspective and network of business experts, this tech innovator is leading his company toward promising e-commerce opportunities in Africa.
“Africa is the future,” says Khawaja. “Investing in the human capital of youth, creating jobs and helping the massive 15-to-22-year-old market become self-supporting is what I really want to do. Allied Wallet is a powerful tool for helping young people break out of their dependency on governments.”
ENTREPRENEURIAL PASSION
Allied Wallet is a leading online payment service provider headquartered in Los Angeles. Khawaja has amassed $16B since creating the company in 2005, and he expects it to double in size before 2025.
“From a very young age, I had an entrepreneurial spirit in my bones,” says Khawaja. “I’ve always been a leader and I’ve always had the passion to work hard. But my first ambition to become a CEO came from my thirst for improvement in the way people do business,” he recently told a small group of business leaders. “I wanted to create and innovate new methods for people to safely, securely and simply accept payments. I had a vision that I wanted to turn into a reality,” he adds.
It was tough going in the beginning, as Khawaja’s requests for loans were turned away by 350 banks. His luck changed following a chance meeting with an executive from Deutsche Bank who agreed to take a risk and granted Allied Wallet’s first seed loan.
The key to success in the online payments business is mastering interrelated issues such as cybersecurity, the banking industry, and the interface between public policy and global trade. Khawaja seems adept in all.
STRATEGY: SHIFT TO ALTERNATIVE PAYMENT METHODS
Allied Wallet plans to enter the African market later this year, starting with the Portuguese-speaking central African nation of Angola, followed by The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda. Commercial activity in these markets is largely cash-based, and therefore ripe for a shift to clean and fast electronic transactions.
While globalization for some companies has meant manufacturing in markets where labor costs are low, or growing profits by selling imported goods from China, Khawaja’s Allied Wallet has incorporated a deeper understanding of global business. Its NextGen Payment Gateway offers what the CEO claims is “more alternative payment methods globally than anyone else.” Allied Wallet sees e-commerce as a whole, singular market with varying nuances. Allied Wallet’s functionality has been extended to embrace the technical requirements of multicurrency payment systems in 164 countries and takes into account the diversity represented by differing needs of each culture.
This new market will require an increasingly growing global payment network, says Khawaja. It will also need
a robust digital security environment. “Allied Wallet already uses a protected state-of-the-art system and PCI-DSS Level 1 Compliance, as well as SHA256 SSL encryption. As the ecosystem gets larger and the risks increase, so will the need to stay five steps ahead.”
Affordability is essential as well. The way Khawaja sees it, the price of making secure payments will have to continue to drop. “With connectivity to third-party features and new payment solutions, you’d think that prices would climb,” he says. “We’ll continue to go the other way. We already offer rates starting at less than 1%. As Africa’s youth come onboard, the size of the user base will grow, and Allied Wallet will lead the way with accessible prices.”
Khawaja foresees a world in which the consumer experience improves, where nearly everyone can also become the merchant. “In the very near future,” he says, “especially in Africa, business will be in the hands of the people—the one-woman or one-man enterprise connected to the world, creating wealth with guaranteed freedom of mobility.”
Partnering with industry exPerts
Allied Wallet Africa has enlisted partners with insights and expertise in the African market. Joining Khawaja are Hisham Itani, Chairman and CEO of Resource Group based in Beirut; N’gunu Tiny, Chairman of Emerald Group based in Luanda, Angola; Bilal Joueidi, co-founder of Allied Wallet Africa and commercial real estate expert based in the UAE; and Rwandan business leader Aimable Mpore.
“Resource Group is a business incubator and leading technology investment group with a portfolio of diversified businesses that capitalizes on technology and human talent,” Khawaja says. The Group has a deep understanding of local markets across the Middle East and Africa. Its CEO shares Khawaja’s goal of equipping youth to succeed in the digital era.
Resource Group has already had a constructive and tangible impact on government automation and citizen experience in the region, which has contributed to digital transformation in the Middle East and African region. According to Itani, while obstacles remain for sustaining a long-term positive business environment in Africa, “we have been diligently working together to mitigate the challenges that range from the underlying technology infrastructure to the market landscape.
“There is a strong need in these markets for innovative digital services that can revolutionize access to digital commerce, improve cashless payments and reduce reliance on paper currency that are in limited supply,” Itani adds. “Through this partnership, we hope to fuel these local economies by empowering their citizens with reliable, convenient and accessible banking solutions.”
Khawaja’s business associate, Angolan banker and thought leader N’gunu Tiny, calls the business environment in Africa dynamic and complex. “The continent still lacks basic structure that many investors would not find attractive. The biggest challenge is to change the mind-set of investors toward the continent. Historically, investor sentiment toward Africa has been shaped by the perception of a continent exploited solely for its raw materials and a headline country risk assessment. It is important that the investment community divorces from the mentality that Africa is one country, and views it as 55 separate sovereign nations, with different governments, diverse economies open for investment and social constructs.”
Emerald Group brings its unique DevOps technique of organization. Development and Operations are entwined under one roof, enabling Africa to leapfrog to the forefront of e-commerce while aiming to integrate digital ledger technology (blockchain) into the mix.Allied Wallet Africa’s partners are immersed in the African market and become crucial to the
success of our purpose in the continent, says Khawaja. Bilal Joueidi brings to Allied Wallet the ability to attract foreign capital for developing large scale infrastructure projects such as airports, roads and hospitals. Aimable Mpore contributes expertise as CEO of some of the largest mobile companies on the continent. These include Telecel, where he introduced the first cellular phone operation in Africa. Together this strong network of partnerships offers a solid foundation to Allied Wallet Africa for future growth.
PROMOTING INVESTMENT INSTEAD OF AID
Allied Wallet believes that Africa does not need aid, and Tiny agrees. “African countries need investments in order to fight poverty and to generate wealth. There is an obvious need to invest in education in order to develop new business leaders and provide them with proper management tools to navigate the risk scenarios,” he says. His Emerald Group specializes in frontier market investments with a strong portfolio in natural resources and finance in Africa. “Africa will need some 600 million jobs in the future, and payment tools will be one way of offering opportunity for selfreliance to many,” Tiny adds.
The partners concur: In the current African scenario, if a merchant could use a mobile device to buy and sell from and to anywhere in the world, he or she could immediately become a competitive global player with local impact. The traditional Western-style branch banking system is not capable of answering the present African needs, and an evolution toward a mobile framework will be key for the 66% of the population that remains unbanked. Tiny sees Allied Wallet’s role as “a technology orchestrator.”
With the recently endorsed single African market expected to be one of the world’s largest single markets, accounting for $4 trillion in spending and investment across 54 of the 55 countries, Khawaja’s focus is worthy of investor attention, as is the backing of some of the industry’s forward-thinking heavyweights.
“The traditional Western-style branch banking system is not capable of answering the present African needs. A mobile framework will be key for unbanked populations.”