Moya Money

Paying African freelancers is a $28 billion market, with 120 million African freelancers in it, growing 17% yearly but it’s broken. The market for solutions which businesses can use to work with African freelancers is fragmented, which makes it difficult for them to manage, contract or pay freelancers. Our vision is to make self employment sustainable in Africa, by providing a platform which makes money flow easier in the continents gig economy. 

Working with freelancers from on-boarding to payments takes businesses 4 to 5 business days a month in admin tasks;

• Approving multiple rates & hours

• Back & forth emails verifying information

• PDFs which are time consuming to extract information from

• Incorrect payment information on invoices

Every year there’s $200 million worth of late invoice payments to freelancers from businesses in South Africa alone. According to the Xero Accounting Survey, 97% of these late payments are due to the finance workflow process, rather than businesses defaulting on payments. We believe that powering businesses financial operations (FinOps) is an exciting opportunity; by streamlining, automating, and optimizing day-to-day finance workflows we can unlock value in Africa’s gig economy.

Our solution is a B2B2C external workforce platform for businesses to manage African freelancers profiles, contracts, billing, invoices and payments in one central place. Our benefits to clients are;

• On-boarding hundreds to thousands of freelancers easily through a link

• Automating contracts and invoices which used to be manual tasks through easily editable templates

• Finance and operations teams receive a single batch of invoices which can be paid easily on our dashboard which align to company pay runs

• Transfer payments easily to freelancers as both businesses and freelancers can link their details to the platform

• Provide our clients freelancers with an interface which enables them to accept invoice requests, send invoices and accept payments

• Freelancers working with our clients can request an early payment on any invoice processed through the platform, before payment terms

Demo link for our product - https://www.loom.com/share/af9... 

Our target customers are Finance and Operations teams who work in businesses such as production companies, agencies, labour brokers. We have two uses cases for clients we're looking to target who we can generate impact from on Africa's creative space. These enterprise clients receive funding to pay creatives and these have helped us build case studies for impact related businesses we aim to service;

• Assitej South Africa - have a network of 1600 creative freelancers - we're assisting them to make invoice payments as part of their Artists in School Project funded by the IDC's MEDIA & AUDIO-VISUAL Social Employment Fund
• Business and Arts South Africa - have a network of 5000 creative freelancers - we're assisting them with contracting and payments for Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme as part of the Arts & Culture

However, the impact we make is on the freelancers who work with these businesses.

This is because their freelancers are typically low income (earn less than $500 a month from them), don't use any invoicing software and used to rely on WhatsApp messages or emails to interact with the client and have inconsistent income because they're usually paid in +30 payment term agreements. We address these gaps for these underserved freelancers by providing the clients they work with and them with an easy to use platform which enables them to invoice, accept payments and earn their income in a professional manner.

Lastly we also address the need of inconsistent income which arises from this form of work through our early access payments solution. What makes our platform different is that freelancers can requests early payments on processed invoices so they don't have to wait for +30 day payments from clients. We formalise this form of work to provide freelancers with consistent income.

My co-founder Sabica and I, were previously freelancers, work closely with our clients on the ground to understand our target market and have worked on other projects related to the gig economy. 

I'm a former management consultant at EY working primarily on projects in the banking and insurance sector. I've also built a non-profit in the education space called Young Aspiring Thinkers which has impacted over 2000 learners, as well as running projects with Oracle, Trevor Noah Foundation and Cornell University. The NPO receives about $50 000 yearly in funded projects and has experience working with African talent as the NPO manages and pays 10 to 15 youth facilitators on each project. I also have experience freelancing, doing sales enablement for two South African fintechs and was invited by the Centre of Public Service Innovation to facilitate 5 design thinking workshop to 200 public sector individuals.

Sabica holds a bachelors in Fine Arts and recently graduated with a Masters in Digital Business and was the former Head of marketing at a crowdfunding startup in South Africa. She also started South Africa’s first student-led consultancy firm in university working on projects with McKinsey and AT Kearney. She was selected to make an artwork for the Malaysian Prime Minister‘s 93rd Birthday, Dr Mahathir Mohammad. She worked at the exhibition, assisting in curating, collecting and engaging with over 50 global artists. She also has experience freelancing as a business consultant in Oxford, and worked on a project building remote engineering teams in South Africa.

We’ve signed up 7 paying clients who have a network of over 7500 freelancers.

• We’ve processed just over $35 000 worth of invoices in total and the value of invoices we’re processing is increasing 38% MoM
• We’ve processed 189 invoice payments on our platform and have on boarded 239 active freelancers from our clients

We're now focused on on-boarding more of our clients freelancers as active users and reaching more businesses as clients.

We target businesses as our core customer segment and are applying to solve to understand how to scale our solution to more creative businesses across the continent working with "low income" freelancers who have the needs we've mentioned above.

We've recognised there's an opportunity to provide our solution to these businesses because they don't have the infrastructure to manage and pay this demographic of freelancers, and these freelancers don't have the infrastructure to send invoices and accept payments. We want to leverage the MIT Solve program to build a solution tailored to this market and also reach partners whom we could pilot our solution with.

Lastly we're still in the MVP phase of our product and need assistance with product development and understand how we could fill the gaps in our solution to deliver a scalable market ready solution. 

Our solution is innovative because of our network effects based approach to solving this problem and also early access payments.

Both businesses and freelancers can access our platform to share information, link their bank accounts and enable peer-to-peer payments. Businesses who are working with low income freelancers who lack data for apps can get invoices, quotes, secure agreements and track timesheets from their freelancers simply by sharing links to them through WhatsApp or Email, once the freelancer fills these out it automatically sends pdfs back to the businesses with correct details without the freelancer needing to use our platform. 

We also allow freelancers to request early payments on invoices, so they can get paid before payment terms. We know how freelancers money is always trapped in payment terms and this solution allows them to access their money once they've provided their services

Our mission as a company is to make self employment sustainable in Africa and to accomplish this mission some of the impact goals which we're looking to reach along the way are;

1. We’re looking to reach 300 businesses, 120 000 freelancers and process over $100M in the next 36 months. For us this will be an indicator of the amount of freelance work we've created
2. We're looking to get active freelance users of our platform paid consistently on time each month they're active on our platform. Either by their clients paying them on time or enabling them to access early payments from our solution.
3. Building additional financial products targeted at freelancers which will assist them to build financial security: medical aid schemes, retirement annuities, access to credit, insurance, tax free savings plans

The SDG indicators which we're using to measure progress of the impact we're making are;

1. Promote development-oriented policies that support productive activities, decent job creation, entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation, and encourage the formalization and growth of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises, including through access to financial services
2. By 2030, achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all women and men, including for young people and persons with disabilities, and equal pay for work of equal value

Our theory of change is that as we formalise Africa's gig economy by providing businesses with infrastructure to work with freelancers and infrastructure for freelancers to earn their income in a professional manner. The gig economy will create economic output which will be able to contribute towards GDP.

This is because businesses will feel more comfortable with giving more work opportunities to freelancers, and freelancers who'll professionalise their work will be able access more financial services products and have the income security to access other products or services which full-time employees have the ability to access.

The core technology which we're using is software provided through a web platform. We're now working on developing a mobile application specifically tailored towards our freelancers

Our team is diverse both in gender and race/class. Thulani is a black South Africa male, Sabica is Parkistani female who currently lives in Oxford UK and Muhammad is a Zimbabwean born male living in South Africa.

Our differences have given us a view into how important diversity is in a team as the differences enable us to continue pursuing building a team which reflects how different we are