 Hey, what's up everybody? I think she forgot to mention. I'm also single I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm gonna get kicked off of a slash already. Anyway, what's up everybody? My name is Benjamin. I'm from Tanzania. It's is in the East Africa Does anybody know where Tanzania is? If not, I will show you don't worry. We can go through it today together So this is my home This is where I grew up. Actually, this is in East Africa. So the Serengeti is in Tanzania That's my home. Anyway, that's not my family. This is but this is where I'm from. This is originally. This is Tanzania Anyway, so I'm here to tell you about a story about my journey in entrepreneurship and how I started the business and why I'm I even building a company and it brought you probably are assuming the same thing while seeing me speak right now Anyway, so I grew up in Dar es Salaam, which is in Tanzania and a British family sponsored my sister and I from K through 12 and that's the company I'm building and This was an eye-opening opportunity because it taught me about grace and favor and start to open up Opportunities for me that I felt like as an individual I never really directly deserved and a lot of us in this room are Maybe products of grace that are still in the process as well or people have given us opportunities Or maybe we felt like okay. I don't directly deserve this or somebody who's believing in me And this is the one of the first families that believed in me that gave me this opportunity to go to this international British school in Tanzania now why this comes full circle is one of the people was organizing slush Who invited me here to speak today also went to with me to the same school So it comes back full circle over 15 years later crazy now as I was going through school I used to get in a lot of trouble. I think I hold the record for the most suspensions of my school history Does anybody do the British syllabus like GCSEs or a levels anybody done those here? Great, so I want to show you my report card from 11th and 12th grade This is my report card over here, so if you can look carefully it says Benjamin Fernandez It says the school I was going to and you can see my grades geography C physics you business E math you now in the British syllabus is pretty messed up you mean the solo below F That means it's ungraded right so basically you suck So it's a nice way of telling you that but in a formal way of not saying you've directly failed But I failed and I didn't do well in school Got in a lot of trouble So I sat there at home. I have one sister what you guys saw earlier She's one year older than me and she was always top of the class and between our own family She was the first person in our whole entire family history to go to university Nobody in my family history has been to university before her so she had gone to America now Obviously because she's gone. I want to figure out a way. How do I get to that place as well? So I you know try to figure out, you know I asked a bunch of different schools to let me in and I got a probationary offer So then I went to America for the first time at the age of 17 This is when I was going The I know I look different, but I forgot my you know crown today, but you know, it's somewhere I'm you know, I'm sure you've all received those emails from an African prince, but that's me Anyway, so I moved to America for the first time. I never lived in America at the age of 17 I was always getting randomly inspected by the police at the immigration office all the time. I don't blame them It's the first time I'm seeing snow Freezing out here in Helsinki. Anyway, so America gave me an opportunity to really explore what I really wanted to do But during my time in career I began a career in television So I used to be a TV host in East Africa started hosting on local TV then went to national TV Television is what got me into payments. Now. How many of you've heard of M. Pessa maybe in this room So I'm best as a large more money service that operates across in eastern Africa now in East Africa alone over 365 billion dollars is transacted on mobile money, which means like your cell phone is your bank account I know it's sensitive to talk about cell phones in Finland because we're having a Nokia, but we can we can move on So the joke you tell your friends when you work in the in the industries when you don't know what to do If you life you go to business school. So at the age of 20, I got accepted to Stanford for business school It was the during the NBA program. So this is my first day on campus I had to bring some African vibes and during my time there at Stanford I've got to meet a lot of different people who are working in technology and they start to really open my eyes because as an Individual I never thought I'd be starting a tech company I never thought I'd be getting you involved in in doing some things like that But a lot of my classmates would really push me because I was really curious about the payment space on the global scale Like Benji, why don't you build this company? So that's what motivated me to go and start Nala and so after I finished at Stanford I went on to work at the Bill and Linda Gates Foundation. I was working the payments team So I was looking at payments across Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and sorry, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda not Rwanda Nigeria and Ghana. So during that experience what I started to learn was the payments ecosystem globally is growing But across Africa still massively broken. There's a massive opportunity for us to build many things I spent a lot of time in the field Interviewing many many different people to try to understand what are the pain points people are facing in the payments ecosystem and the space over there And this is how we began looking at Nala Across the world, $61 billion was sent to Africa and over 4.8 billion was lost in fees Africa is the most expensive continent in the world to send money to and it's also the lowest income region in the world So it shouldn't be this way. So the big question I asked myself is What can we do to reduce the cost of sending money or trading with the continent, right? It's the most expensive region in the world to trade with and because there's so many barriers to entry the trade costs will still remain high So what does this look like in the future? How do other companies for example today? We have a world of creators on tiktok those creators in Africa while they make amazing content can't get paid into their mobile Money wallets because they don't have credit cards or debit cards They have mobile money wallets and tiktok doesn't pay out to those wallets today, right? So who's enabling that environment for all these large? Organizations or businesses that are trying to trade in and out of Africa to make those payments So when we started doll up we initially right now we support the UK and the US We enable people to send money to five countries across the African continent and in the past year We raised 10 million dollars. We're backed by Excel We're one of the Excel's largest investments on the continent as well as Bessemer and many Angels who are actually here with us today in at slush such as Alex from deal Vlad the founder of Robin Hood in the US These are all some of our investors who've backed us But we have a lot of responsibility of things that we want to get done the continent is really big But it's also very complicated. It's very complex. The continent holds 1.3 billion people today in 2022 alone 41 million people left the African continent for opportunities in Europe the US the UK And many more migrants are starting to grow and more Africa is a very talented continent, but the opportunities don't always exist to everybody who is there personally This has been my journey I started the company because I believe that many people should not be paying these high exorbitant fees to transact and trade of the region I really care about now as we look at payments across the world in Finland or in the UK, maybe you can send transfers for free You can make trades for free that is in the case with many different regions around the world And so as we were building now that we start to ask ourselves What is winning like what a success look like a hundred years from today? We're trying to build the rails for greatness where many different companies can trade across the rails that we're building on the ground Across Tanzania today Kenya Uganda Rwanda Ghana are the markets We currently operate in on the African continent But we're seeing how can we scale up and manage more and more regions in the in the market in the last year We grew 800% in our payment volume from January till today We grown of our team from seven people to nearly 70 people today as we speak We just hired two more this morning and so the team is growing quite a bit of work to do But I'm not here to give a pitch I'm here to just tell you about our journey and why I started the company anyway payments in Africa 1% built My name is Benjamin Fernandez. Thank you so much for listening today. Cheers. Bye. Oh and let your friends know I'm single