How did you and your team get started?

Compared to other regions globally, sending and receiving payments across Africa for individuals and businesses is tedious and expensive. There's no continent-wide rails, payments take several days to settle, and the process is fraught with high fees and unfavourable exchange rates. Our grand vision is to become the go-to rails for cross-border payments in Africa, providing a faster, cheaper, and more convenient alternative to traditional fiat rails.

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We envision a future where our agent network is widely adopted across the continent, enabling individuals and businesses to send and receive payments across Africa easily.

What did you build during the SCF Startup Camp on Stellar/Soroban?

We built a Stellar Anchor prototype that allows Stellar USDC holders to send money to anyone within Africa through our USD stablecoin agent network.

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What was your experience like?

We'd been considering building a Stellar Anchor for a while, so this was a way to assess its feasibility. The SCF boot camp was incredibly eye-opening. We had a chance to speak to Stellar engineers and refine and validate that our idea was feasible.

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The user-testing sessions were also great! We learned a lot about how unintuitive some parts of our products were. It's astounding how blind we were to those parts. After completing the bootcamp, we went ahead to integrate user testing properly into our shipping process now.

Memorable moments

Exploring our long-term goals. It's always nice to be aspirational.
We enjoyed breaking down our idea into a systematic storyboard.
Building a prototype and transforming our sketches and storyboards was also enjoyable.
Talking to users and watching them use and criticize our prototype opened our eyes to a lot of stuff we missed.

Lessons learned

User testing is critical. Building for yourself in a silo is a surefire way to alienate your customers by creating something they don't find intuitive.

Next steps

We built a Stellar Anchor prototype that allows Stellar USDC holders to send money to anyone within Africa through our USD stablecoin agent network.

Words of wisdom for future teams

Highly recommended!

Authors

Clinton Mbah, CEO of Accrue

Clinton is a senior software engineer with extensive experience building delightful consumer products. He previously worked at Helicarrier on Buycoins (YC S18), Nigeria’s second-largest crypto-exchange, and Sendcash, Nigeria’s largest crypto-remittance product, before leaving to co-found Accrue. He also had a ~2-year stint as a founding engineer at Tiger Global-backed Float (YC W20), building its core API.

Adesuwa Omoruyi, CMO of Accrue

Adesuwa is the CMO of Accrue, where she drives growth and customer acquisition. Before Accrue, she led product marketing efforts at Helicarrier. Before becoming a product marketer, she gained a wealth of experience interacting with users by working as a customer associate for Helicarrier’s products — Buycoins (YC S18), Sendcash, and Sendcash Pay.

Related SCF Awards Submissions

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