Bulls n Bears Entrepreneurship Zone :: Mobilising Kenya’s public transport

[Bulls n Bears]

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After 15 years in the United States, Mary Mwangi planned to return to
Kenya, launch a payment product, let it run itself and head back to the
States.

However, after launching Data Integrated, she found that SMEs were facing
intricate issues that would see her stay and launch the first IoT (Internet
of Things) powered public transport management system in Kenya.


Take us back to the beginning of this business


“I worked a lot in banking and in business auditing while I was in the US,”
Mwangi says. From her audit experience, she understood the power behind
efficient digital infrastructures. In 2011 she was attracted to the growth
of mobile money in her home country Kenya, where she saw the opportunities
in the system that brought her back home.

Mwangi started Data Integrated, a digital payments company, in 2012 to
bridge a gap in the mobile payments market. “A lot of people were using
mobile money, but for money transfers and not for commercial purposes,” she
said. Customers would withdraw money from their mobile wallets and use hard
cash in transactions. Business owners would then transfer the hard cash to
their mobile wallets.

“I thought it would be helpful if the businesses could actually be paid
using mobile money.” She said installing an accounting system through which
mobile money transactions could be recorded would be to the advantage of
businesses, and so she began to solve these challenges.


How did the she grow the company into the business it is today?


Mwangi says she owes her success to her family, as they have been
supportive by financing the business to grow to where it is currently.

“Most of my family members have been in business for a long time, so they
understood my venture,” she said. It is also her family who urged her to
come back from the US and settle in Kenya.

Her dream was to stay in Kenya for two to three years to get the business
to work or give it to someone else to run, and then go back to the US. “But
as I got into it, I realised there are actual people in the background who
we are trying to create a solution for.”

Today, Data Integrated has several payment products. This includes the
MobiTill Epesi Smart Public Transport app, which is revolutionising how
vehicle owners manage their fleets. The digital payment app also calculates
earnings by using a smart camera to count the number of passengers that
board a vehicle – a first in the Kenyan market.

Other products include a payroll system for SMEs and point of sale
machines. As Data Integrated gears towards local production of these
machines, it expects to see a rise in employee numbers, which currently
stands at 23.

The company hopes to capture the Kenyan transport market in the coming
months with their solutions and have signed up several public transport
associations.

She says returning to Kenya to start the company will always be one of the
best decisions she has made, and she is no longer contemplating going back
to the US.


Surely it couldn’t have been that easy. She must have faced some
challenges?


“Being a payment platform, we need to integrate with banks and telecoms for
payments. Establishing those partnerships has been a real challenge. A
contract that should take something like two months, takes two to three
years before we close,” she says.

Being unknown in the market was another hurdle she had to overcome. “There
is bias against local founders. You have to prove yourself more than a
foreign founder to some of the telecoms and banks,” she says.

“It slows down [the] progress of many local companies, and most ventures
have died because of that,” she observes, adding that it also takes longer
for integration to happen due to banks’ and telecommunications companies’
concerns about cyber security.


Anything we can learn from her experiences?


Having a product that works has been more valuable to Mwangi than
traditional marketing. Her company started getting calls from potential
customers after they witnessed how the solutions worked for other companies.

She says customers’ testimonies about the company’s products were its
initial marketing. “We didn’t even think we were doing marketing. We were
just trying to finish and test the product.”

The company has now created a marketing department to come up with an
awareness campaign for its solutions.

“I don’t think my employees are motivated by money, but rather by the goal
we are working towards – to build a better payment system for the SMEs. We
are building products to benefit others. They are also learning a lot in the
process.”

Mwangi hopes that in 10 years’ time she would have sold her business, after
having achieved what it set out to do – offering reliable payment and
accounting tools to businesses. After that, she hopes to venture into fixing
other challenges in the systems around her.—Howwemadeitinafrica 



Mary Mwangi

 

 

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