With C-Pay, you just download the app from Google Play and you are ready to send money to anyone, even when you are outside the country. You can ask your friend to lend you a few bucks using their “Nzame” service. Plus, you can also have C-Pay hooked into your website so customers can pay you directly on your website, as if they were using modern credit or debit cards!
[Check them here: chaperone.co.ls or download C-Pay app at Google Playstore].
Mr Mohau Mochebelele, the former student of the National University of Lesotho (NUL) International School, and his team have created a platform that gives you more than just a mobile money as you know it.
Theirs is a mobile payment platform that is meant to revolutionise the online payment systems in Lesotho and across Africa. It is powered by investors from as far as South Africa and Canada. The company is also powered through an army of technology and business gurus educated from NUL, UCT, UNISA, WITS and other schools.
Africa is transforming and Financial Technology [Fin-Tech] is at the core of that transformation. Young people are creating easy-to-use technologies that are set to challenge the decades-old monopolies which dominated the space since the 20th century.
C-Pay is in that race!
“At first we just wanted to create an online savings platform, what we called Money Market Savings Fund. It would be powered by mobile money,” said Mr Mohau Mochebele who is the Managing Director of this exciting company.
As we said, he is a former student of NULIS. He then went to Machabeng College, then the University of Pretoria and later did his Master’s degree with the Wits Business School. He is now doing his PhD in FinTech with the same school. At some point, he worked in Securities Trading, Wealth Management and Venture Capital sectors while still based in South Africa.
“When the idea of Money Market Savings Fund came, the obvious question was, where could we establish it? In South Africa, or in Lesotho? It turned out it would be easier to register and operate in Lesotho,” he said.
Plus, Lesotho is a virgin land when it comes to innovation and it is slowly becoming a hot-bed of innovation and entrepreneurship in the region. Like some of his friends we covered earlier in this platform, he decided to leave the “greener pastures” and he came back home, not so he could be hired “to fill papers” in an office somewhere but to create a digital money platform that is already changing the way we do things.
First they successfully raised funding, as we said, from partners in South Africa and as far as Canada.
Then he crossed the border, met friends and they formed a formidable team.
The idea was to work with existing mobile money platforms to support the savings platform. That proved to be impossible! Then he adopted the attitude of the legendary Stanford University technology and innovation pioneers, some of whom have been quoted as saying these hard-to-forget words, “we want to work with the electronic industry, but if it is not there, we shall create it!”
The fact that you are reading this story on your mobile phone or personal computer may as well be due to those legends who, in the latter half of the 20th century, laid the foundations for the now world-renowned innovation ecosystem we call the Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley is the birth-place of Big-Tech companies we take for granted today.
So because the existing technologies were not ready, they had to create their own mobile money platform first. Of course that needed patience as they were to take nearly four years from application to getting a licence to operate.
As a matter of coincidence, Covid hit around the same time they got the licence and the world suddenly realised the importance of cash-less money.
“Although we are in mobile money space, it is important to realise that C-Pay is a supporting technology that will make it easy for us to power our other dreams,” he said. “First and foremost, we see ourselves as creating digital technologies that will solve problems in the financial and mobile money sector.”
And they are making good on the promise.
For instance, Lesotho is entering the interesting phase of online stores! If you are in that business, have you ever gone through this nerve-wracking experience? That is, trying to convince the existing mobile money platforms to enable your customers to pay directly on your website using mobile money as if it were a credit card?
That would be convenient, isn’t it?
But, lo and behold! you have probably found that you just couldn’t!
Well, until C-Pay stepped in!
“Ya!” he said, “we can now help hook our mobile money service into your online stores such that people can pay directly on your website using C-Pay.”
If this is not a digital money revolution, then there is no such a thing!
Mr Mochebelele speaks pationately about an army of his fellow team members whose ingenuity and hard work has made the compay what it is today and it includes: Liteboho Semoko, Lesole Polilane, Makoae Seoaholimo, Nthatisi Qheku, Ketumile Lesoli, Lereko Maluke, Joang Leluka, Karabo Nkolanyane, Hlompho Hlalele, Telang Moeketsi and Tlotliso Thamae.
