Victoria Munguti is the CEO of HeptaPay, a bill payment application serving East African Region she co-founded in 2020.
She also helped co-found Hepta Analytics which specializes in various practice areas under data science and analytics to transform raw data into information and insights.
Here is Victoria’s story as told by WoK.
Victoria currently serves as the CEO of HeptaPay.
The company enables customers to deposit mobile money, top-up airtime or pay bills in Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda and Burundi.
Through the company’s easily navigated system, Victoria says customers can make payments from their debit or credit cards directly to mobile money wallets in the aforementioned countries.
“The solution is particularly remarkable for its ease of use as a customer is not required to sign up on HeptaPay to transact,” she said in an interview with Lionesses of Africa.
Since its inception, the company has reached over 1,000 users and it has facilitated a transaction volume of more than Ksh 135 million.
Idea
Victoria mentioned that the idea to set up the company was as a result of constant frustrations caused by hefty fees and delays while receiving money from her family abroad.
“Back then, most local merchants in East Africa did not accept debit/credit card payments. This inspired us to create a solution that would help address this problem, but little did we know that there were many other expatriates and members of the diaspora who faced the same challenge,” she said.
Together with her business partners, they decided to set up a platform that has lesser cost implications.
HeptaPay which was incorporated in 2020 has also been beneficial to merchants.
“Some merchants have expressed their joy on how they are benefiting from our easy-to-use plugin that easily allows them to start receiving digital payments from a wider base of customers increasing their revenues and reach,” Victoria said.
Entrepreneurial background
Victoria also discussed her entrepreneurial background, revealing that her family ran a shop to meet the daily needs.
“My baby steps in understanding the thought process and skills of running a business come from my humble beginnings
“The hunger to succeed and the motivation of the team has helped us in becoming a fintech company that is serving the East African community,” she said.
She also advised women looking to get into entrepreneurship saying, “The best advice I would give to women who would like to start up is that the idea is not always clear at the beginning so don’t be scared to start because as you move up the ladder of entrepreneurship, things start becoming clear.”
Victoria said the company’s goal is to reduce transaction cost up to 1% and reduce remittance costs to 3% across Africa.
“We envision a completely decentralized platform using the emerging technologies that place control on a distributed network of agents all over the world without a central point of control,” she added.
