SureCash is in discussion with investors to raise a series C funding round by 2017, aiming to fund further growth and expansion. Shahadat Khan, Founder and CEO of the company said to Future Startup in early February, in an interview. Mr. Khan expects to close the round sometime this year. Mr. Khan said that in 2017 his company plans to invest heavily in driving user engagement as well as growing its users base.
SureCash is one of the important players in Dhaka’s fintech space. Started in 2010, the company now serves over 12 million users, which they acquired largely through partnership with government and other payment partners, has a network of 100 thousand agents, and provides payment platform to five local banks and a host of other payment partners.
The startup claims to provide a simple and complete payment product for both offline and online payment transactions. It also has a mobile app that allows users to send-receive money, top up their phones, and do other online and digital payments. The company is also working on connecting user’s bank account to the SureCash account.
We wrote in a previous report: SureCash raised an investment of $7.00 million in 2014 from Osiris, has a growing user base, and offers MFS platform to five banks for their MFS services and has a growing number of payment partners including colleges, companies and the Government. The challenge, going forward, for the company is in engaging its existing users to use its service on a daily basis while also pushing the user growth.
MFS market is largely dominated by bKash followed by Rocket. While SureCash considers itself as a combination of payment platform and service than a mere MFS player, as Mr. Shahdat Khan puts it in an interview with FS:
SureCash is a complete payment service for people as well as businesses and government. We ensure best customer experience for sending or receiving money using feature phones or smartphones. We are the market leader in payment collection and disbursement sector in Bangladesh. We have developed a very robust and flexible software platform that can be customized to meet the requirements of even very demanding payment partners.
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Please note that bKash and Rocket are great MFS products primarily providing person-to-person payment and mobile recharge services. Since SureCash works in a broader payment space, we are not in direct competition with other MFS providers.
it still has to grow its user base and engage them. The value of any network grows manifold when it engages its users. We assume SureCash understands that very well. The company apparently plans to increase its number of transactions: “we want to make doing payment from your mobile phone easy and simple, be it paying bill, salary or shopping or getting remittance or for the government disbursing money or collecting the taxes. We are growing our partner network and aim to be the network that handles most payment transactions of the country.” In order to see which direction SureCash walks, we have to wait.
