Hi Ruaan! Tell us a bit about Revio.
To put it simply, Revio helps businesses turn getting paid into a competitive advantage.
In Africa alone, three out of ten payments fail. Annually, these failed payments result in a $37 billion loss. A scary statistic.
Very few businesses have invested sufficiently to deal with payment failures. As a result many experience excessive involuntary churn rates and revenue losses.
We give our clients the tools they need to get their customers to fulfil their payment obligations by building a better customer experience around paying for them.
Where is Revio today?
We’ve worked hard to use Africa as our proving ground for our capabilities. With our expansion in the last couple of months, we’ve proven that businesses need more than what incumbent providers can actually provide.
Soon, Revio will serve clients in 2 more countries in Africa and we will have those markets to further prove our model.
In 2024, we hope to start scaling in more emerging markets, specifically in Latin America.
Would you say that Revio is more suited for Third World markets than it is for Euro-American markets?
Well, you can never compare South Africa to Africa or even Europe as an example. Emerging markets have very different problems. Each market has its own payment culture, unique payment methods and regulatory requirements.
In Africa and other emerging markets, cash as a payment method is still more predominant. If you look at Nigeria as an example, a large part of the population still goes to an agent in order to pay for their DSTV account or their municipal bills.
Emerging markets have emerging needs. This makes things more complicated than what you would see in First World markets.
In 2020, the revenue generated by online shopping in Africa was estimated to be around 27.97 billion U.S dollars, an increase of over 6 billion since 2019. Recent research shows that In 2025, the whole e-commerce sector in Africa might reach a value of over 46.1 billion U.S. dollars.
So digital payments are growing, and in doing so people are now able to generate a credit history that allows them access to credit and in turn buy recurring products and services that they could not before.
This is great for local and international businesses wanting to invest. However, they quickly learn that recurring payment models require a service mentality associated with much higher requirements than those in conventional e-commerce. New to market businesses quickly realise they're not just selling a finished product, but rather a long term service during which the customer relationship must be continually maintained.
With Revio, we aim to help businesses deal with the complexities of collecting revenue at scale by fully automating their order-to-cash processes. Businesses are able better utilise customer data and learn from their behavioural patterns to implement engagement strategies that keep customers paying, for longer.
I’m glad that you brought up Nigeria as an example. They have had a few interesting financial products where people can use alternatives to traditional banking.
Would you say that Revio is looking into factoring that into its model?
Absolutely. Payments options are evolving worldwide and as a Fintech company that helps businesses get paid, we need to be at the forefront of new methods of payment and enable our clients to accept the ones that are most convenient to their customers.
In South Africa alone, we have many different payment methods. For merchants, the most important thing to understand is what their customers want and how they would like to pay. With that, they must also look at their own business and business model and what different methods make sense for them.
So the question is rather, how do we make it easy for businesses to experiment with different payment methods, determine what is best suited to their business model, and what their specific customer base prefers.
Within these emerging markets, a lot of banks try to break into the informal markets. How do you think you have come to understand these markets and the different customer profiles?
Many have tried entering new markets by replicating successful business models they had elsewhere. This has led to some spectacular failures.
From our experience, each market is unique and ever-evolving. Our approach is to find complementary partners that understand the intricacies of each region and work with them to find solutions that can add value to businesses and their customers.
