South African startup Wallettec, which develops payment solutions for the sports betting industry across Africa, is selling more than 200,000 of its MyBux digital vouchers each week in Kenya.
Launched in Cape Town in 2013, Wallettec is a mobile money integration company that has provided mobile payment solutions in more than 14 African countries, including Kenya, Uganda, Namibia, and South Africa.
The company started life working with banking institutions, and later focused on providing merchants and retailers with the ability to accept instant payments without ever sharing any payment or personal information.
Over the last three years, meanwhile, it has shifted its focus to working with mobile money providers and making mobile money more accessible and easier to integrate with multiple providers in multiple countries, with successes in this space leading it to exclusively focus on sports betting.
Wallettec’s voucher system, MyBux, which was launched in Kenya in March 2019, currently sells over 200,000 vouchers a week. The voucher allows players to top up their bets using a voucher instead of cash.
According to Johan Meyer, the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Wallettec, the voucher system was developed to solve a simple problem – to enable the large cash customer base to get access to the online payment space.
“Although mobile money is still very popular on the continent, we still have a large customer base who still prefers to deal in cash. MyBux makes it possible for those customers to go to a MyBux agent and buy a voucher in cash and the customer also has a choice to convert a voucher back into cash at any of our agents. And, this is a process that doesn’t require any fancy hardware or even a bank account, just a mobile phone,” he said.
MyBux can be accessed via the Wallettec Rewards app, MyBux website, or the local agents.
“Our thinking has always been about convenience, simplicity, and efficiency, and our products are designed for the people in mind; to make sports betting accessible to even those in the remote areas,” said Meyer.
