By: Simeon Ononobi
Our mission is to create solutions that help SMEs succeed while increasing consumer buying power and opportunities.
Yet in Africa where we started from, we realized quickly that SMEs have very little chance to succeed as they have a lot stacked up against them. From not having the infrastructure to technology lacking, down to having consumers with little buying power. Also, the consumers that have enough to buy SMEs cant even track or make them repeat customers.
Then if you flip the switch on the customer’s side, you find that there are little or no opportunities to have a good life. Unlike in developed countries, where if you work you will definitely have the best of life or at the bare minimum a good life.
ThankUCash seeks to solve these issues and more. We have set out to first help SME’s succeed by providing tools to help convert store visitors to loyal customers. On the consumer side, we have set out to make shopping a great experience and also create more opportunities.
Starting with our flagship feature which is to help businesses reward customers and make them come back to buy more. This has made the shopping experience even better for most consumers, as they get excited when they get an SMS or a birthday message from the business they bought products from months back. Creating this community makes for a better shopping experience. We have also layered this with instant deals for businesses to be able to reach more customers, instead of spending so much on marketing or advertising.
ThankUCash recently raised funding of $5.3million in seed to expand the product range to allow customers to get Buy-Now-Pay-Later facilities. We believe that if you have a good job, and can afford a good life then you should not be exempt from a good life.
Currently, to buy a car, furnish an apartment or even buy a TV, a customer needs to pay in full instead of having to pay in installments as his/her salary allows. These opportunities dont exist and we are on a mission to solve them.
We are expanding to other African nations. ThankUCash is to launch in Ghana and Kenya in the months of February and then to Rwanda, Uganda, and South Africa by June of 2022.
ThankUCash will provide the tech infrastructure which will connect merchants with credit/loan facilities such that customers can pay directly for goods and services through the ThankUCash super App, with loans from credit facilities.
“The technology is such that we have our machines in stores. So as customers request loans, we generate a code for it, customers input it into the POS machine and the merchant gets credited directly. The code can only be used in the store chosen and only for the loan amount requested, such that at the end of the day the customer is buying straight from the merchants. We’re opening this infrastructure to everybody and want to actually give that platform to loan companies,” he explained.
With a staff strength of about 45 employees and a little over two years of operations, ThankUCash has recorded over 600,000 users and on boarded over 1,000 stores on its platform whilst processing $80 million-plus in transaction volume.
Our ultimate vision for ThankUCash is to create sustainable solutions for SMEs/merchants to succeed while increasing customer buying power.
“The vision for us at ThankUCash is not just for our merchants to be happy because they are staying in business and making money. We also want to make spending fun, because with us there is always an opportunity for you. It ranges from the ‘cashback’ product where you get more customers, to ‘deals’ where you get to sell off your products quickly or ‘buy now pay later where you get to sell your products whether or not the customers have money, and even ‘remittances’ where you can sell yourself to the diaspora.
“At the end of the day, the idea for us is to make sure that all our products are geared towards the survival of the merchants and to redistribute wealth towards Africans,” Ononobi said.
You can check out more about them here – https://thankucash.com/