B2B Payments: Unseating Cash through Value Chain Integration

The Trajectory Africa

This episode of The Trajectory Africa features Yele Oyekola, Co-founder and CEO of Duplo, a company on a mission to streamline financial operations for African businesses. We’re diving deep into the world of digitizing financial operations, from payables and expense management to reconciliation and reporting.

Africa’s $1.5T B2B payments market represents a massive opportunity in a space that’s ripe for innovation—think medium to large businesses in industries like FMCG, logistics and manufacturing. These companies have a lot of challenges like managing manual operations to navigating payment terms.

But it’s not just about payments— it’s really about the unsexy business of digitizing financial operations. Digitizing payments bleeds into tackling financial operations as a whole—payments in the front, financial operations in the back. (Huge thanks to Gwera Kiwana for being first to apply the mullet metaphor to finance, specifically crypto.)

And the dimensions of this opportunity, from money movement to workflow automation, are pretty interesting. In Episode 5, Verto’s CEO Ola Oyetayo made the connection between enabling cross-border payments and managing tasks like account receivables. With Yele, we dig into how to dislodge cash within a value chain by automating transactions across it.

Tune in to hear about:

[2:08] - The basics of b2b payments

[15:50] - What Duplo does, how it started, and the size of the bizopps opportunity

[22:55] - Acquiring customers’ customers
[33:46] - Automating the key functions of a finance department
[42:10] - Duplo’s tech stack and business model

[56:21] - Value chain integration/infiltration as moat

[1:02] - Counterintuitive first principle

Recommendations:

• Chasing Outliers. Why Context Matters for Early Stage Investing in Africa, a report I co-authored on VC investing in Africa

Connect on social media:

• Yele Oyekola on LinkedIn
• Duplo on Twitter
• The Trajectory Africa on LinkedIn
• Tayo Akinyemi on LinkedIn
• Tayo Akinyemi on Twitter