CashEx

Digital banking and tools for African migrants

Company: CashEx offers a digital banking platform for African migrants that provides essential financial tools before, during and after migration.

HQ Location & Year Founded: Boston, 2022

Founder: Kingsley Ezeani, Co-founder and CEO, is an entrepreneur with 12 years of experience building and scaling technology businesses in Africa. He is a Mid-Career Master in Public Administration candidate at Harvard Kennedy School and a graduate of the Oxford MBA program. In 2019, Kingsley was selected as an Obama Foundation African Leader.

Funds Raised and VC Investors: $750,000 from Pillar VC, angel investors and grants.

• Where did the idea for CashEx originate?

Having been an immigrant from Nigeria to both the UK and US, I have witnessed the difficulties that immigrants face in obtaining basic banking and other financial services such as remittances. Africans are among the largest populations of immigrants currently (with 110,000 African migrants to the US each year), but there are few digital banking services that are fitting their needs. As an entrepreneur who previously founded one of the largest media businesses in Nigeria, I felt it was my next mission to create a platform that would empower this community with the financial services that they need.

• What is the key problem that CashEx intends to solve? 

We plan to solve several problems for African migrants: saving US dollars in Africa (as a hedge against currency devaluation), opening bank accounts in the US to help with savings and establishing credit, and sending money back to Africa, which has some of the highest remittance fees in the world.

• How are you most differentiated as a service?

We work with migrants before, during and after their journey from Africa to the US (and later, to Europe). Our digital first platform allows us to seamlessly acquire users before they emigrate abroad. Once we launch our remittance service, we will also dramatically reduce the cost of sending money back home.

• What are the company’s key accomplishments to date?

We have had 50,000 sign-ups so far in just two months since launching in beta. Over 4,000 users have tried our US dollar savings product. We are also proud to have won awards from the Harvard Business School New Venture Competition, the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge, as well as new venture forums at MIT. We also got funded by Google as part of the Google Black Founder’s Fund.

• What lies ahead in the plans for CashEx?

We plan to launch our digital bank in the US by March 2023 and our remittance product by Q4. Our goal is to stretch beyond Nigeria and the US to become the digital banking platform of choice for all African migrants worldwide.

Ron’s Take

We have explored the plight of immigrants of migrant workers previously in this series, with companies such as Boundless, Rewire and BoldVoice. Often among the most overlooked members of society, immigrants are ironically among the most productive and additive to the economic and cultural engines of their new homeland. Millions of native Africans now call the US home and this number is only going to increase. CashEx will enable them to not only integrate more easily into society, but also to earn and return more of their hard-earned dollars to family members back home who live off of meager incomes. Rather than being treated as second class citizens or ignored entirely, immigrants should receive a red carpet welcome and innovative fintech companies like CashEx will play a critical role in doing so.