As a platform that addresses the business-to- business buying and selling of merchandise across Africa, Morocco-born WaystoCap is aiming to solve the fragmented situation in a market that is still in the process of going digital. Besides being an online marketplace for products, founder and CEO Niama El Bassunie asserts that WaystoCap is also an “ecosystem offering services such as insurance to suppliers, financing to buyers and logistics management to remove inefficiencies.”
El Bassunie, who previously worked at PwC in London’s energy markets team and for a large energy company in South Africa, admitted she wanted to get a hands-on approach in the region, after getting the entrepreneurial bug while working on side projects. Her first forays in the trading sector consisted of sourcing used cooking oil (UCO) in Morocco, Spain and Egypt amid the Arab Spring revolution.
El Bassunie remembers that “this first experience trading internationally got me excited about the possibilities offered to a young first-time entrepreneur, trying to help buyers and sellers across Europe and Africa.” On another trading project between Turkey and Guinea, besides seeing the drive of the local entrepreneurial community, that’s where she got to work closely with two bankers, who later became part of the founding team of WaystoCap, Mehdi Daoui (Chief Operating Officer) and Anis Abeddine (Chief Sales Officer), which was then followed by the entry of Chief Technology Officer Aziz Jaouhari Tissafi. Though they found the existing trading process exciting enough, the WaystoCap team saw the value of “creating a digital marketplace that would address all the challenges we had been facing, and enable businesses in Africa to trade faster, cheaper, and securely.”
Following trips to Silicon Valley and researching various models, the co-founders saw the potential for building a trading marketplace in Africa, and with the aid of Nic Pantucci, Head of Platform & Growth, launched WaystoCap in Casablanca, Morocco in 2015. The startup’s mission is to “not only facilitate trade in Africa, but also to foster trade,” whereby the company uses technology to deal with “the opaque nature of the financing, insurance, and payments of trade,” and then monetize by charging a commission on a successful trade.
As of writing, El Bassunie notes that thousands of buyers and suppliers have signed up on the WaystoCap platform to either buy or sell goods, with an “average order size of US$30,000.” Working across borders, the startup works with strategic partners to ensure its efficiency, which include Coface, a trade insurer company to protect suppliers against payment defaults, as well as an undisclosed trade finance company. WaystoCap currently targets primarily soft commodities and agricultural products, as the team found it’s the most indemand in the African markets they operate in. When asked about competition to the services WaystoCap provide, El Bassunie points toward the Yellow Pagesthough she notes that it only enables suppliers and buyers to merely connect with each other.
This is in contrast to WaystoCap, which “helps make the deal happen” with its competitive prices, and verified suppliers and buyers to facilitate financing partners and secure payments. Developing the venture had its own barriers, particularly in getting to, as El Bassunie says, Marc Andreessen’s product/market fit ideal, an issue they countered by continuous improved product releases, which would not only make sense for them,…