Bevan Ducasse, founder and CEO of wiGroup, a platform that provides point-of-sale mobile transacting, describes his last two years as an incredible rollercoaster.
He grew up in Natal, completed his B.Com degree at Stellenbosch and worked for a consulting start-up for a couple of years. "I've always been driven to start something new, to create change and see innovation in how people do things," says Ducasse. "I've never been a tech person per se, but I understood how tech shapes and changes the world as we know it."
At the age of 23, he came up with an idea for people to use their phones as a form of payment. But a year and a half in, he realised that wiWallet was just another of hundreds of different mobile payment applications. On approaching retailers to integrate his system into their point of sale software, he noticed they were overwhelmed - they had no idea how to engage and interact with all these mobile payment apps. It was then that Ducasse found the core focus for wiGroup - building the platform and owning the link into the retail point of sale.
"We pivoted our business from being a business-to-consumer company to a business-to-business company, building a solution to allow a retailer to take advantage of a single integration into one layer - namely the wiGroup platform. From that layer, any transaction app it launches can be plugged into our platform and be turned on across all the different retailers."
wiGroup's business model is very simple, says Ducasse. Innovation is ongoing at the young company that now employs just over 60 people.
"I have 65 intellectual property projects on my developers' list, to keep us ahead and relevant, outperforming what's happening in the market."
He says he wants to inspire others and 'grow the business so that is the beaming light for SA'. The wiWallet platform is currently piloting in the UK, Nigeria, southern Africa, and there's interest in the US and Europe. "Everyone is launching apps. We have the platform that the world needs."
First published in the January 2015 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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