Skip to content

Ding Blog blog

  • Press
  • Contact
  • Press
  • Contact

Jul 30, 2020

Sweating the details with Chipper Cash

Chipper Cash was set up to make sending and receiving money across town and across Africa fast and easy for everyone. As expansion comes the company is now looking at how they can make their service even easier and more relevant for their customers. This quarter Ding talks to Hasan Luongo, the man responsible for Growth Marketing, about the company’s journey, and how keeping your eye on the details and your product offering are key to success.


Ding: Tell us about Chipper Cash, your role, and what was the inspiration for the company?

Hasan: Chipper Cash is the mobile app that lets you send and receive money across Africa the fast and easy way with free transfers and the lowest cross-border rates. We’re currently live in seven countries with more coming soon. My team spans user acquisition, activation and retention, monetization, and product development. The inspiration came from our two founders’ struggles with sending and receiving money while growing up in Uganda and Ghana. They noticed how expensive, unreliable and inconvenient it was and knew there could be a better way. So they set off to tackle that huge problem and make it a reality.

Ding: What is unique about the company?

Hasan: Empathy and solving our customers’ pain points around sending money cross-border is at our core. Everything we do goes back to those two things.

Ding: You’re expanding – recently in SA – what’s driving the growth?

Hasan: Expansion is driven by our desire to expand Chipper to even more users, and build a broader network of people who can benefit from the app. As the network of users grows, the utility the app provides increases.

Ding: What are your top three tips for surviving and thriving as a digital first business?

1) Ship product – this is everything, you must focus on the product, sweat the details, and just keep making improvements.

2) Reliability is paramount in FinTech, you’re already facing an inherent lack of trust by simply not having branches and locations in the physical world, so the product must work.

3) Internal team morale is so important, we’re a pretty globally distributed team, and it can be lonely working from home. Finding ways for the team to socialize and connect beyond the daily work flow is a unique challenge for digital products and remote teams.

Ding: What impact has Covid-19 had on your business and your customers?

Hasan: For our customers this has meant periods of lockdown and stay at home orders which have been hugely impactful to their daily lives. On the business side, cashless payments have massively increased, so adoption of new platforms, like Chipper have accelerated. Internally we are a remote-first company with team members around the globe. However, we maintain offices in Kenya and a few other countries, so those teams have really shifted from the office to work from home, with all the usual growing pains.

Ding: How have things changed since Chipper Cash raised $8M in seed capital last year? 

Hasan: We have made a few key hires across the company, launched in South Africa and continued to grow quickly in key markets. We’re continuing to focus on building the best product for our customers and expand our core team.

Ding: There are many companies looking to serve and digitise the underbanked population in Africa – what differentiates Chipper Cash?

Hasan: We actually save our users on every transaction, every day. The fees associated with many of these services are outrageous and we’re committed to simply providing a faster and easier to use service, at a lower cost.

Ding: How prevalent is mobile money in Africa and what impact has partnering with Ding had on your business and your customers?

Hasan: Mobile money is where Africa is far ahead of most regions and it’s a massive advantage – there’s great appetite for it among customers who see the benefit in terms of enabling them to transact where perhaps before they couldn’t within the traditional banking system. Ding gives our users the fastest and easiest way to buy airtime and helps to make our offering more robust. It’s a pull feature back into the product, instead of being an app people use once every few weeks or months just for sending money.

Ding: The pandemic has made digital access and financial inclusion even more important. In what way is this going to shape the future of Fintech in Africa?

Hasan: Like with Zoom, the pandemic is a fast forward button for adoption of technology trends. People are now looking for tools to solve problems instead of being told about a solution to a problem they may or may not have.

 

 On a lighter note:

 What’s your mantra or favourite saying?
 “Be relentlessly resourceful” – Paul Graham

 “Solve big problems by chipping away at them every day” – Chipper Co-Founders

 What’s the single best piece of advice you ever received?
“Sweat the details..” This advice is useful for me every day, be it cooking, or helping my kids with homework or making coffee or launching a marketing campaign.

 If you could go back to one historical event to witness it, what would it be and why?
 Nelson Mandela arriving in Cape Town after being set free from Robbin Island. Having seen the videos of this event, I can imagine is was  such a joyous occasion.

 What makes you roll your eyes every time you hear it?
 “X problem is the result of a few bad apples.”

 What do you wish you had invented?
Instagram

Avatar

by Andrew Tonna

share Share on Facebook Tweet Share on LinkedIn
Follow

In September 2018, Ding’s users sent their 300 millionth top-up

Ding has been making connections possible since its launch in 2006

76% of the world’s phones (or 5 billion and growing) are of the prepaid variety

Ding has a network of over 500+ operators, across 140+ countries

Our platform is available in 600,000 retail locations around the world

We have 200+ employees, coming from 28 countries around the world

Today we have nine offices – Dublin, Barcelona, Bucharest, Dhaka, Dubai, New Jersey, Miami, Paris and London

Ding delivers a top-up every second, in 3 seconds – connecting loved ones around the world

Did you know?

Most Popular

Mar 31, 2020

Digicel – rising to the challenge

Read More

Apr 03, 2020

Migrants workers – the silent victims of this crisis

Read More

You might also like

From big plans…to the final frontier – this quarter Ding talks to enigmatic Pay-O-Matic CEO – Jay Guskind

May 01, 2018

Read More

Communication – it sets us apart; and brings us together

May 01, 2018

Read More

Ding New Jersey springs to life

May 01, 2018

Read More

A date for the diary….come and meet us!

May 01, 2018

Read More

Ding unveils future-proofed app as top-up demand soars

Jun 01, 2018

Read More

From a coffee in Dubai to 300million top-ups – this quarter we talk to Ding’s founder and CEO, Mark Roden

Nov 28, 2018

Read More

Popular Articles

UAE Exchange – meeting the digital age head on

Dec 18, 2018

Phones, payments and pandemic trends: Exploring the impact of Covid-19

Jan 27, 2021

Transforming customer services with live chat

Dec 18, 2018

Mobilising the next one billion

Dec 18, 2018

Connecting the data

Dec 18, 2018

    Join the Conversation on our social media channels

    Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Linkedin Follow us on Facebook

    My Account

    • Overview
    • Purchase History
    • My Contacts

    Services

    • Mobile Top-up
    • Nauta Top-up
    • Mobile apps

    Quick Links

    • Support
    • Promotions
    • Countries
    • Blog

    Company

    • About Ding
    • Press
    • Careers
    • DingConnect – Become a B2B partner

    A little goes a long way

    ©2023 Ding Blog Web Design and Development by StudioForty9.

    Modal title

    Modal body text goes here.

    Go back to the top of this page