Started in 2010, SureCash is one of the important players in Dhaka’s fintech space. The startup raised an investment of $7.00 million in 2014 from Osiris, has a growing user base, it claims 12m people use it, 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.
Recently we spoke to Mr. Shahadat Khan, Founder and CEO of SureCash, you can read the full interview here, to know about his life and journey and SureCash and the digital payment in Bangladesh. MFS has experienced a phenomenal growth in Bangladesh over the past couple of years.
According to Bangladesh Bank, there are 19 active MFS players in the market, out of 19, SureCash empowers five banks, and the sector is getting competitive and attention as well. In our discussion we tried to find out about the state of SureCash, its future plans and what makes it different from other MFS players:
The basics
- SureCash is a mobile payment platform involving people, businesses, and government in Bangladesh. Users can make and receive government payments, pay school and college fees, pay utility bills, pay for goods and services, and make person-to-person (P2P) transfers.
- Business model-wise, it is more close to VISA and the likes. SureCash provides the platform, switch, backend support, distribution channel, joint marketing campaigns and manages the network. Partners can co-brand such as Rupali Bank SureCash and FSIBL FirstPay SureCash.
- It is more like a common, shared mobile banking and payment platform. The company also maintains the common agent network and take care of the all other aspects of the platform
Numbers
- SureCash started in 2010 and raised $7 million in funding from Osiris in 2014. The company plans to close series C round of funding this year.
- It has partnerships with 5 local banks, including one of the largest state banks and more than 550 payment partners.
- About 250 people work at SureCash apart from over 1000 people working full time for delivering its services.
- SureCash has more than 100 thousand retail agents across the country
- Working with over 470 colleges and schools in this country. It collects payments for all these colleges.
Disbursing payments for 14 sugar mills in the country under a disbursement project for the Bangladesh Sugar Corporation. - Working with the government to disburse stipends to 10 million mothers.
The Future
- “Our plan is to be the leading mobile payment platform in the country,” says Mr. Shahadat Khan. “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.”
- SureCash claims to provides a very simple, flexible and complete payment product for both offline and online payment transactions. The company 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 to connect user's bank account to the SureCash account.
