Rebuilding Business Banking for Africa's SMEs: Inside Manza (formerly Zazu)

Oh, good — thank you, pleasure. We've been meaning to meet and chat for some time, and you came highly recommended by some of our very close people, so I'm glad to be here.

I was in Zambia, actually. I was in transit, coming from Morocco, and I needed to sort out some things in terms of visa and so on — I needed to get in and out of the country. So that was one of those trips. But yeah, always on the move.

Well, I can only take it as a compliment. Qonto, for your audience who may or may not know it, is probably the second fintech unicorn after Revolut in Europe — that may have changed in the past few months, but it's definitely a great success story. These guys have done a great job when it comes to redefining, I guess, almost a category. There was definitely a before-Qonto and an after-Qonto. The before-Qonto was an era where founders and entrepreneurs didn't have much choice but the big incumbent French banks — the likes of BNP Paribas and Crédit Agricole — and typically they were handed a corporate account at best. So that's definitely a similar mission we're on, with a very different context, different dynamics, and different types of entrepreneurship on the continent. But at least we share a similar mission, and hopefully a similar destination as well.

Yeah, I think you kind of defined it. The abstract way to say it is that it's an all-in-one financial management platform for SMEs. It means a lot of things, but essentially it starts with being a better business account for entrepreneurs and business owners. The way we see it, accounts, payments and cards are essential commodities — that's what sits at our core — and we've tried to do that in a better, more modern, more intuitive way, and in a more affordable way. And then we go a bit further: we've added accounting tools, invoice management, tools that typically existed outside of banking and payments — whether it's lending attached to an invoice, or the ability to have team management on the platform. The vision is that the banking experience should be much more modern — in general it hasn't really changed in the past decade. It should be collaborative: it should let you bring in your accountants, your CFOs, whoever is involved in the financial side. And lastly it should be integrated and connected, especially in a world where you can integrate your cloud tools with Notion and so on. So that's a bit of the vision — developing an all-in-one platform, as you said, but with the essential core banking things at the core.

Yeah, good that you remind me of that part of my life. Indeed, I grew up playing tennis, and I had the chance to play at national and international level when I was young. Eventually I ended up in the US — I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to combine sport with studying finance, and that was my way into the business world. I worked a little bit in the US, in finance — that was the aspiring career back then, to work for a bank. And eventually I saw that early fintech revolution coming. I was working in London at the time, and this is where — funny enough, Revolut just had a big hack announced in the past few days, so they're top of mind — but that was the period where Revolut came about. There was Monzo, which was Mondo back then before it became Monzo. It was the early movement of these neobanks and fintechs, and people were like, "what is this thing?" Then it caught on, and I wanted to jump on that train. So I worked for a company called Bankable, which was one of the pioneers — one of the first banking-as-a-service platforms. What that means is they were one of the first fintechs to have a payment licence and provide the rails to the likes of Revolut and Monzo to initiate payments and create wallets. So I really got to see the back kitchen around these fintechs, and what was going on behind running a neobank. That's how I got my foot in the door. Then I joined one of the very first neobanks of that generation, called Fidor Bank, which was even younger than Revolut and did very well in Germany. And eventually I ended up at Solaris Bank, which became the leading banking-as-a-service — and, most recently, a unicorn — in Europe. That's where I met my co-founder Rinse, who was my boss back then; he was already quite senior. And we noticed two things. One, it wasn't the early days we had known in Europe and the UK, where it was all fun and you could break things and run fast — the regulation started to catch up and slow down anything innovative. And in the meantime, we'd also seen a model — you talked about Qonto, but we were part of building very similar ones: there was Penta in Germany, which was bought by Qonto, there was Kontist — we'd seen a lot of these SME models that had done very well and kept doing well. We wanted to bring that knowledge and experience into markets where there was still everything to build. And that's how we ended up in Africa, in South Africa, and eventually building Zazu.

I mean, as I said, it's not like we pioneered something. We knew that model had made its proof, so to say. We'd seen it working in developed markets — whether it was the US with Mercury, or Qonto, or in the UK — and in emerging markets as well: there was Aspire, I think in Singapore, and other neobanks. Not so much on the SME side, but there were echoes of these models resonating in these parts of the world. So we thought about it, we chatted about it, and eventually we got on a plane and spent a week in South Africa purely doing market research — speaking to businesses in cafés, tech startups, ecosystems, everything. The funny part of the story, which we still joke about with my co-founder, is that we saw the whole spectrum of different types of businesses, but I remember stepping into a pharmacy with a list of questions — "do you like your bank?" and so on — and that person answered everything not wrong, but everything against what we expected. She was like, "no, I'm fine with my bank." Obviously not a typical ICP, but I came out so dejected. And it was like, listen, it's a pharmacy, that's not the initial business we're after, so don't worry about it. But eventually we got out of that trip with the conviction that the banks were doing okay — actually more than we expected on digital transformation in South Africa — but still, when it came to accounting, bookkeeping, and aggregating a lot of the tools that existed outside the banking experience, there was still so much more to do. So that's when we had that "ah" moment — there were multiple, but that was probably one of the first ones.

Well, you don't, actually — that's the answer. I'm saying you don't, but that's part of our job: we're convincing every day. Even opening accounts in South Africa today, you always have to commit. But what I'm saying is you need to quickly understand who your early adopters and early customers are, like in any business. This idea that you're going to convince someone who's very far off from that is a bit far-fetched. And — this is maybe a good answer to it — we stepped into Morocco in parallel, so we operate in two markets, South Africa and Morocco. And I can tell you, not even joking, we opened an account for a pharmacy about two days ago — in Morocco, not in South Africa, but we will in South Africa one day. The point is, we started with a very niche focus, which was startups and tech entrepreneurs, and it turns out that as trust developed within that community, and as we started adding value, the word of mouth picked up very organically. That's where a lot of different ICPs started coming to us — obviously not farmers or anything far-fetched, but increasingly things like hotels, real estate businesses, coaches, online training — things we'd never imagined when we first drew up the ICP. So my answer is: first you really need to add value to a core subset of people, and from there word of mouth will come out. If you're good enough, and if you really add value, the people who need your product will come to you, or find you.

Yeah, it's very different, as you said. There, we owned, or were at least part of, the back kitchen — the product development and the launch — but we never truly owned the customer relationship, or the go-to-market and acquisition side of things, which is actually a very big part of the business. What we took from it was everything around the processes, developing and testing your products, the confidence of knowing how to launch, how to build a card, how to build a basic core banking system. It also taught me to simply have a network of people — and that's how Zazu started, too: a lot of the people we work with and still hire today are people we worked with over the past ten years, and even our advisers are people like our first boss. What we also learned is the value of constant iteration, of test-and-learn, of going fast rather than hesitating and waiting for the right moment, or the perfect product. That's something I learned very early on at Fidor — Fidor was one of the first. So, a few things. One is that constant iteration: launching fast, breaking fast, and iterating from it, through the concept of the MVP — getting to that very minimal product that's just enough. Because I meet a lot of founders who think, "but maybe it's not enough" — get it to market. We've seen that with Zazu, so many things we've learned by going to market fast. And lastly, something very much embedded in the philosophy of both Solaris and Fidor at the time: understanding the power of partnerships. Making sure that whenever there's something you don't want to own — that isn't your core business — you can rely on partners. That was the essence of Solaris and Fidor: they were the partner if you wanted to outsource that infrastructure. So that's what we still bring today in our mindset. Whenever we sit down and say, "we want to develop, I don't know, international payments or FX conversion features," we ask ourselves: is that something we want to own, or something we want to delegate because someone does it better? And one last point: the time we were at Solaris and Fidor was very much when Europe started becoming more standardised in terms of payments and licences. So it taught us to think internationally from day one — not just in terms of licences, but in terms of architecture and how we build products. We've seen in certain markets, whether South Africa or Morocco, founders develop great things but think very local to start with, and that can impose certain limitations down the line. Whereas, whenever we build something now, we think: are we sure this component can be reused tomorrow if we launch in Zambia, or in Kenya? So that mindset. And how do you know when something is a great product? As I said, there's a mix of things. One is we always start from the job to be done. It sounds theoretical, but that's the reality. We try to move away from thinking in terms of features like invoicing, or foreign transfers — those are features, but what is the entrepreneur or business owner actually trying to do? And the answer becomes: "I want to get paid, and I want to make sure my accounting is in order." So you start from understanding how you're solving problems. Two, we're lucky enough to have built a community in both markets where we can quickly test things and get feedback. There's nothing better than that. We're getting on a call tomorrow, actually, to get feedback on our pricing strategy — it's literally one WhatsApp away. These guys love the mission, they come in, and that's a direct voice to the market before you even launch. And three, as I said, it's just launching — the earlier you launch, the earlier you get either the negative or the great feedback. An example: in Morocco, the cards took us longer, because a card is a complicated product and you depend on partners, so it took a few more months than expected. In the meantime, we launched what we call payment links — a simple thing where you share a link and any business owner can get paid by their customers. In Morocco, little did we know it wasn't the core business we wanted to get into, but customers asked us for it. We started with a single payment link — you get paid, it expires. Then they came to us and said, "it's awesome, we love it — can we have a link we can reuse constantly, so I can put it on my website?" I go to my technical team and say, "these guys want that," and they're like, "ah, Germain, we're working on the cards, that's not our core." I said, do it. They do it, and these guys love it: "amazing, now I can put it on my website — but can we go further, can I have checkout sessions?" — meaning, a bit like Stripe, give us APIs we can embed into our website so it becomes more dynamic. I go to my technical team, they do it, and as we do it we're seeing these subsegments — e-commerce, SaaS businesses, hotels and so on — that couldn't accept payments online before. So it's proof of how everything you do before that is theory, to be honest. Obviously we had experience, so we knew what was supposed to work, but by scratching, by testing, by going, you start to see the reality. Getting the feedback — there's nothing better.

Just don't do it. Don't do it — if Rinse is listening now, don't do it. No, actually, I'd say do it, to be honest. We've had a lot of discussions — one of my best friends is a solo founder, and I don't know how he does it. Being a founder, being in a startup, is extremely hard — let alone doing it alone. So whoever's listening, I'd say do it. To start with, just in terms of complementary skills: Rinse is on everything around accounting, financing, legal and product; I'm on everything around sales, marketing and so on. It's very difficult to be across the board. How did it get started? We just had a good relationship at work — a very similar dynamic, we were both passionate people who enjoy getting things done, and that's how the idea to do something together came about. Initially, we wanted to just do advisory — side things, advising fintechs and early-stage neobanks on how to build products and launch, using our expertise — until we realised one day, "hold on, why would we advise people on things we could do ourselves? And we're at the right age — if we don't do it now, why not?" Then we started, very rationally, to be honest. We sat down and looked at what businesses we could do based on experience. So it's interesting — maybe there are entrepreneurs who always knew, who were born for it; for us it was very rational. We sat and said, okay, what are the businesses we could do based on experience: banking-as-a-service, buy-now-pay-later, crypto, plenty of things. Then we ranked them based on what triggers us, the ease of execution, the regulation and so on, and we shortlisted a few. Then we looked at a few markets, and we started running at it, testing and validating these hypotheses. So it was the result of a lot of market research — and then eventually, as I said, we just jumped. At some point you've got to say, look, this is all theory, this is paper — let's get on a plane, let's go there. That's what made it real for the first time.

Well, we had backers — yes and no. It's not like from day one we had people putting money on the table. It's always a jump. If you look at it, we gave up very comfortable positions — Rinse particularly was a senior executive on a very good salary; his life was set, he could work in any fintech in Europe on a comfortable salary and live anywhere, with a family. So there's always a trade-off. And to your question — how did we convince these people? Honestly, we thought we'd have an easier time, in the sense that we had a story, we'd worked in the industry for some time. But when we set foot on the continent, we realised it's not as easy to raise money as in Europe or the markets we'd known. People trusted our background, but didn't particularly trust that we could launch in markets we'd never lived in or knew anyone in — which was fair enough. So eventually we went back to our network to start with. And, back to your initial point, it wasn't a hard discussion, in the sense that we'd worked with these people, they'd worked in the industry, they knew our work. It was almost like, "of course, here it is." I think that's a good takeaway: it's almost like a relationship. If people aren't convinced, it never worked, at least in my experience — whenever I spoke to investors who said "I'm not sure, let me think," and then eventually came back, it was always an easy conversation. So it's a bit cliché, but of course you're constantly in convincing mode — yet if you find the right people who believe in the mission, it should be quite smooth.

No, definitely — it's more value than money. Money is helpful when you start, of course, but the reality is sometimes it's a name. Just having that name on the cap table brings a bit more trust, and then another person comes in, and another — so it gives you a vouch, a stamp of approval in the industry. That's one. Two, some of them are on our board, some are advisers, and it's the ability to always call them for specific advice, because they're all very expert — some in fundraising, some in products. We actually have a call with one of our early investors, a top person at Qonto, and it turns out we have a few questions on how to optimise our roadmap management — something we don't pay for, it's part of the deal. I can also tell you examples where we needed to get someone across the line — an investor, or a fund — and one of our early investors or advisers was one WhatsApp away, or was friends with that person. So it's a nudge, the ability to validate something, the ability — when we're not sure before launching a product — to draw on people with experience. It's a mix of things: intros, and much more valuable than the cash, eventually.

Yeah — first, they should visit. It's a beautiful country, great culture. And it's developing very fast — well, it was already quite a developed market, but it's definitely experiencing good momentum on different fronts. E-commerce is accelerating, things are digitising, there's a lot of cash usage still, and there are major events happening — I think they're hosting part of the World Cup — so there are very big pushes from the government to meet a lot of target goals. What was interesting is that, first of all, we didn't know anyone — you could have told us to launch in Chile or Argentina and it would almost have been the same. But, back to your point about angel investors, there's a full-circle moment here. One of our very first angel investors was Ismael, one of the leading fintech figures in Morocco — the equivalent of, I don't know if I can call him the Steve Jobs, but he's done very well in the fintech space there. He actually got one of the very first payment licences in the country — and now the government is pushing for a lot of new licences. He told us, "look guys, I just got a licence here, I'm building my banking-as-a-service platform so other players can also enjoy part of the infrastructure we built — why don't you come here, test and learn, and see where it takes you?" And so we did — literally, back to getting on a plane and getting there. We had conversations back and forth with Chari, which is Ismael's banking-as-a-service platform, and literally three months later we were live. That was very interesting, because we weren't sure about the Moroccan market — we felt it was very early, there was exciting momentum, but adoption was very slow, not as fast or as deep as what we'd seen in South Africa. However, the gap left by the banks and the existing legacy players across payments and different services was so big that people were just very excited to have new players coming in. And lastly, you have a whole new generation — and I think that's what we'd underestimated — a whole new generation of entrepreneurs and business owners, either entering SaaS and e-commerce, building the next generation of things we've seen across the world; or, even where a major part was unbanked, or traditional businesses that had nothing to do with tech or fintech, that new generation — their sons or grandsons — is now taking over and wants to digitise. They don't want to deal with manual stuff, cash, invoices. So we saw those different angles — new types of entrepreneurs, the SaaS and e-commerce and online business people, and traditional businesses starting to digitalise — all coming together to adopt new solutions, and we were at the right tip of that. Obviously there are still challenges, because they're early adopters, and part of the infrastructure is still being built, but overall it's very positive, and it's a very good blueprint for markets very different from South Africa — it gave us a way into the rest of the Maghreb region.

That's once again back to your previous question about the things we'd learned — and I mentioned partnerships. We understood from day one, whether in South Africa or Morocco, two things. One, we're still new in these markets, so we don't want to reinvent the wheel or refigure things out that other players have already done — which was the case with Chari. They'd built the rails already, connected to the local payment schemes, got the licence, built the relationship with the central bank. So why would we go through that whole thing on our own? Especially in a country like Morocco, where there's what we call marocanité — that national identity spirit — which is even more present. So we always understood we wanted to rely on people who'd already done part of the way for us. And two — and this is the case with Revolut — we never wanted to go head-to-head with the banks or the banking system, because it's still a very powerful one, especially in those markets where these guys had a long-standing monopoly and dominance. Should they want to kill you, they can. I'm not saying that's the case in Morocco, in all diplomatic terms. But my point is, there are two ways to look at the Revolut story in Morocco. One is, "well, fine, Bank Al-Maghrib is being cautious" — but fairly so, right? You have this giant that wants to come into your country, into a market that's been ultra-regulated and ultra-cautious, especially around multi-currency and cross-border payments, with corridors that are very complex between Morocco, Europe and other countries — and, as far as I knew, with no real plan to explain how they'd contribute locally, or work with local partners, and with a very big risk of having a serious impact, positive and negative, on the economy. So I understand the cautiousness, and the need for that local spirit, which we understood from the beginning. Of course we stepped in — but in most of these markets we partnered with local players. The first hire we always made in each market was a GM, someone who understood the market, who had ties to the central bank and the local authorities — someone with grey hair, who didn't know too much about fintech but could open doors for us.

Well, not regardless — you know what I mean — despite the fact that it opens up risk, for sure. That concentration isn't just in Morocco; it was the case even in Europe before Qonto and so on — you'd have maybe four banks that held, not 90%, but 80%. You had similar forces until it was pushed by regulation. Here, it's not pushed by regulation so much — the regulations are following through — it's more pushed by the government, and by market demand, at the point where people become aware of these solutions and start to expect more. If the country wants to grow and reach its potential, it has to go through digitisation, and it has to open up, whether to international or national solutions — innovation has to boom, and for that you need to be open. They understood this; they do it cautiously, in a controlled way, but the central bank understands it's for the benefit of all. And the established players — yeah, we're still learning to navigate this. The way we're trying to do it, very early on in South Africa — that first trip was two things: market research, but also meeting the banks, because we wanted to find a partner. Some said no, some were possibly interested, some might be. The way we look at it is, we really try to massage the banks — come in in a friendly manner, with an honest spirit, to find synergies. Because we have a lot of things they can't do — speed, bringing new features fast, targeting certain segments they've left over for a long time and, frankly, that I don't think they'll be able to catch up with — and they have distribution, and products they do very well that we might never do, like mortgages, credit, insurance, investments. It's not an easy balance to find, and we're not big enough yet to be top of their mind. But we're trying to find that angle where we make them understand we're not here to fight them. Back to the early days of the fintech revolution — it was very much about that: "banks are trash," until, a few years later, both sides understood it doesn't make sense to bash each other — we need you, you need us. So we came very much into that spirit.

They're all true. They're all true.

Yeah, 10 minutes — so 10 minutes is probably how long the application takes if you have your documentation. But the fastest end-to-end... that's what we advertise, which is partially true, in the sense that you can complete your account-opening process in 10 minutes, even faster if you have everything. To get the account approved and reviewed — the fastest, because my head is in South Africa now, but I wonder if it's about 30 to 45 minutes. Still, the business account is amazing. On average — obviously we don't have the volumes of a big bank, and we didn't back then either — but it's still quite fast. There's still approval on our side, checks, Chari also has to do checks, and the partner bank has to approve. But the end-to-end process is quite smooth, and that was compared to things we'd hear in Morocco — I'm not joking, sometimes weeks or months for people to open bank accounts. That is true, and it's true we launched in Morocco faster. We were very hands-on, and that's why the word of mouth kicked in, because certain businesses went from a monopoly market, where there was no incentive for anyone to care, to these guys coming in, listening, picking up the phone. When we arrived, whenever we had a waiting list, someone joining, I'd literally pick up the phone myself — Rinse too — good old-fashioned sales: "hey, how can we help you? Let us open your account. You ready? Let's do it." These guys almost believed it was fraud, or a scam — because no one had ever called them.

It's all over — that's a lesson we try to keep across every product and experience: it's not one block, it's plenty of edges, left and right. All the way from — for example, in South Africa, as I said, the banks are semi-online, but at the end of the day it's not really a digital onboarding, it's like a form you fill out online. At some point you're always stuck somewhere, and then a banker has to call you. For us, all of that process is done online — you don't need to go to a branch, we can collect your information. There was also a sense of urgency: one of our key KPIs is how fast we can open an account, especially at the start. It's not particularly the number of clients, but how fast we can open the account — so we wake up in the morning thinking, how can I accelerate this? Both getting that KYC across the line, and small things — a note that says a document isn't accepted, or "make sure the document is black and white." I can give plenty of examples. For certain documentation we need your signature — like a lease agreement, if you don't have a contract showing you're an established business. I won't get into the details, but instead of sending the form, getting them to print it, go get it signed — we prefill it in DocuSign, so we just send it to them, they have it, they sign it, press a button, send it on. It's a bunch of mini-processes where we try to gain a minute here, five minutes there, half a day there, and it all adds up to a smoother experience. And the last point — we've done this a lot in Morocco — instead of emails, I always tell the team, and I get so mad every time, and they know it now: we don't do emails, we prefer WhatsApp. WhatsApp, and call if we need documents. Call Ian, saying, "hey Ian, this is Natasha from the support team, just noticed you're missing one document, can I help you with that?" — or WhatsApp. It's a bit of a sensitive one, but Morocco is very much a WhatsApp market, so that lets us chase and get documentation much faster. And lastly, we opened accounts, we were available at any time — I'd open accounts on the weekend, or at 7, 8, 9, 10 at night. So, voilà.

Definitely. It's different markets and dynamics. In Europe, you don't really do commerce on WhatsApp, but in Morocco everyone is on WhatsApp. So we understood this. There are two ways to see it, but in the end they always appreciate someone who cares enough to get them across the line, and gives them quality. When we arrived in Morocco, what we heard quite often was, "man, these guys aren't answering me, nobody answers me, I can't speak to customer support." We moved from there to us calling them, saying, "hey, how can we help, how can we get it done faster?" So they really started to appreciate speaking to someone.

These are reflections we have. In our experience — whether at Solaris, or if you look at Qonto, which I think recently got its banking licence — that's usually when there are a lot of positive things, because you can start owning most of the processes and offer more interesting products. But with it also come the problems: the regulators look much closer at you, there's much more reporting. So I don't know. Initially, in terms of DNA, we're very much partnership-driven and tech-focused. If one day we think it can add value to go deeper into certain things, it could be — and I hope we get there, it'd be nice, because for now, for example, I can't use the word "bank" in a lot of things — I always have my banking-as-a-service partner hitting me on the fingers. So at least being able to speak freely and say we're a bank. But other than that, we understood from the beginning that we wanted to play at the experience level. For me, whether I'm a bank, a payment institution, or nothing, doesn't matter as much as: am I providing the best experience in the front end, and solving the jobs-to-be-done issues that are missing today? That's the question that comes first to us. Whether it's a banking licence or whatever route, that's a secondary question for now.

Yeah — as an entrepreneur, no matter the stage, we'll see how it goes. You never look further than the day-to-day... well, you have to think in terms of vision, for sure, but especially when you run a fintech, one day you have to fix payroll, or fix a payment — it's rare to live in the future. But what's next for us is that we want to double down in both markets we're in, Morocco and South Africa. We're in a good position now, starting to have a mini flywheel effect — that word of mouth picks up, and we have a lot of businesses coming with zero marketing: "I heard about you guys through this business." So now it's how do we go to the next level, where we reach not just a few hundred or one or two thousand SMEs, but the next 10, 15, 20,000 customers. That's one. And two, how do we take that vision outside these two countries soon enough — at least build the blueprint. It doesn't mean we have to expand tomorrow, but at least getting the blueprint ready, both in terms of technology architecture and processes, so that tomorrow, if we want to go into Zambia, Botswana, Algeria or Tunisia, we have a blueprint that exists — so we can show that we can execute an international expansion quite rapidly. That's also something I've learned.

We'll do a different podcast.