Pakistan’s NayaPay raises $13M SEED
The Pakistan-based FinTech and alternative payments pioneer NayaPay has secured an exceptional $13M in SEED financing to roll out P2P hybrid solutions to serve the unbanked segment of the population.
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Karachi-based FinTech and alternative payments solution provider NayaPay has successfully raised $13M in its latest funding round. The SEED round was backed by a consortium of major investors including Zayn Capital, MSA Novo, and Graph Ventures.
NayaPay aims to introduce a payment platform to enable P2P interaction in a secure and cost-effective manner bridging the gap between the consumer and the financial services available to them. With a drive to digitize Pakistan’s financial transacting and make access to digital payment more inclusive to the large underserved segments of the population, the Pakistan-based FinTech has rolled out a chat-based P2P payment platform for teenagers and freelancers, as well as plans to issue digital and physical cards linked to the NayaPay accounts.
As observed in our Pakistan 2022 Venture Investment Report while Transport & Logistics ranked first by capital investment over the past year (driven by Airlift’s historic $85M) great strides have been made by the FinTech sector. Pakistan-based FinTech startups recorded more than 2500% YoY growth in funding over 16 more deals than the year before. While it is important to highlight the phenomenal growth in VC funding across all sectors in Pakistan, to cross the $300M mark in 2021, sizable investments by alternative payment, spend management, and crediting solutions including TAG, CreditBook, PostEx, Finja, and Sada Pay marked the industry as the third-largest in Pakistan over 2021. As most recently recorded in our State of Startup Funding- 2022 Emerging Venture Markets Free Report, the FinTech sector was the most prominent industry in 2021 accounting for more than 20% of all deals and 30% of all capital deployed across Emerging Venture Markets
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In order to create a foul-proof and holistic offering, the Pakistani FinTech led by CEO Danish Lakhani has spotted and secured strategic partnerships to push its product and elevate its capabilities. In 2018, NayaPay partnered with Meezan Bank to accelerate its growth, simultaneously boosting Pakistan’s digital transactions. To that effect, NayaPay then partnered with Visa to boost its cross-border money transfers. The partnership with Visa also helped NayaPay to leverage its security, capabilities, and reach. In 2021, the Pakistan-based fintech company, after a year-long inspection, earned its EMI (Electronic Money Institution) license from the State Bank of Pakistan, securing its ground as a legitimate fintech company in Pakistan. Danish Lakhani, CEO of the company at an event, said that “We at NayaPay hold the firm conviction that Pakistan needs a robust, local payment service that provides similar user conveniences to and has as profound an impact on the transaction economy as those which PayPal, Venmo, AliPay and WeChat Pay have on their native markets.”
Pakistan presents a huge market potential due to its low account penetration rate. Currently, only 82 million adults out of the total of 132 million adults have unique bank accounts and only 33 percent of the women. This presents a remarkable opportunity for the likes of NayaPay to close the gap and capitalize on large market opportunities. NayaPay has launched its chat-led super app targeted primarily at students and freelancers and is also building a Software as a Service that would offer universal payment acceptance and financial management services. CEO Danish Lakhani told TechCrunch “Students and freelancers are among the most underbanked population, and they are our first target market. They find it very difficult to open bank accounts because they don’t have a source of income. Bank compliance departments consider them very high risk, but we see them as a group with the highest lifetime value.”
NayaPay will be able to utilize its newly acquired funds to further develop its super app and market and SaaS solutions as well as expand its market reach to cover further segments of the population. Zayn Capital Frontier, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Faisal Aftab concluded to TechCrunch “We are very bullish on fintech in Pakistan. While just beginning to emerge, Pakistani fintech startups have the advantage of learning from peers and placing better informed strategic bets. We were impressed by the completeness of the vision of the founding team at NayaPay, and their differentiated platform-based strategy– first focused on servicing the needs of underbanked consumers and SMBs with specific use cases and building out from there.”
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Source: News