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The Entrepreneur Rewriting Africa's Payment Playbook
Forbes Africa
|April - May 2024
Benjamin Fernandes is the founder and CEO of NALA. Born and raised in Tanzania, at 17, Fernandes received a conditional scholarship offer from the University of Northwestern in the US for his bachelors.
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During this period, Fernandes was a national television personality in Tanzania. After graduate school, he worked at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation before leaving to start NALA.
Having worked with mobile money and experienced the pain of moving money into Africa, Fernandes started NALA, a payments company built for the African continent. In 2019, NALA became the first ever East African company accepted to Y-Combinator by focusing on acquiring licenses and building payment solutions. Today, NALA holds a solid footprint in ten African countries, including Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania, growing its revenue by 10x in the last year alone.
Fernandes discusses the important role of licenses for building in Africa and more.
Q. What do you think makes building platforms in Africa challenging?
This story is from the April - May 2024 edition of Forbes Africa.
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