About Bamboo
Picture this: It is 2015, two years before your first ‘real’ job. You’ve come across your first investment books and some other wealth creation content online. You’ve consumed these sources so much that you now know that you cannot build wealth from saving money alone. You’re saving up this knowledge for when you get a regular income to start building wealth. Fast forward two years, and you’ve finally gotten the job, but there is a problem. Even though you have the knowledge and the interest to invest globally, like most young Africans, you don’t have access to a platform built with your reality in mind.
That changed around the late 2010s when innovative solutions like Invest Bamboo (Bamboo) emerged, giving everyday Africans convenient access to local and global markets. Launched in Nigeria in 2019, Bamboo introduced fractional investing, allowing users to invest as much or as little as they want in their favourite publicly listed US companies and ETFs – a group of companies. Now, with more than half a million users across Africa, Bamboo has expanded its offerings to include fixed income savings, mutual funds, and Nigerian equities.
The Challenge
- Immediate
When building a solution that makes funding an investment account and accessing the global capital market possible without a foreign bank account (or other common workarounds), the user’s experience at every interaction counts. Bamboo needed to solve payment collections for Naira in real time, ensuring that users can smoothly and securely fund and withdraw from their accounts using the currencies and payment methods they prefer to use regularly without any delay.
- Subsequent
Bamboo’s mission was never limited to Nigeria. The ambition to serve more people across the continent came with new questions. How to scale outside Nigeria without rebuilding payment infrastructure each time? How to handle collections in multiple currencies with the same fast and secure payment experience? And of course, how to navigate regulatory standards and compliance in new markets?
The Solution
- Local & International Collections
- Local & International Payouts
Bamboo launched on Flutterwave. Their integration with Flutterwave in 2019 not only met their immediate needs; it proved vital to answering their subsequent questions on scale. As a company laying the foundation for connected payment infrastructure across Africa, Flutterwave’s API enabled Bamboo to collect funds and settle customers in naira via various local methods, including cards and bank transfers, from Bamboo’s earliest stages.
As the company scaled its offerings and operations beyond Nigeria, it was well-positioned to leverage Flutterwave’s payment infrastructure and actually did so to support collections in both international and African currencies, such as USD and ZAR. This flexibility meant Bamboo didn’t have to build from scratch in each market; it could focus on extending its vision and bridging the gap between young Africans’ desire to build long-term wealth and access to the global market.
The Outcome
From an initial launch in Nigeria, Bamboo has grown to South Africa, Ghana, Canada, and can always count on Flutterwave for further expansions. The company has processed over one million transactions, well into the hundreds of millions of dollars, representing a significant flow of value across Nigerian Naira, South African Rand, Ghanaian Cedis, and US Dollars.
Behind every one of those transactions are thousands of journeys towards financial freedom, made possible by seamless access to investment opportunities powered by Bamboo. They represent the young Africans putting their investment knowledge into practice and civil servants saving for family needs through full or fractional shares and fixed-income savings in both Naira and USD. When it’s time to access their capital or receive returns on their investments, Bamboo customers are assured of quick payouts, also powered by Flutterwave.
Bamboo offers an excellent user interface and outstanding customer service, enhanced by Flutterwave’s near real-time, secure, and multi-currency payment solutions. This combination makes their product feel intuitive and easily scalable to new markets. Speaking on the journey with Flutterwave, Richmond Bassey, Co-founder and CEO of Bamboo, shared: “At Bamboo, funding accounts and withdrawing capital or gains conveniently and securely is central to our mission of making global investment accessible to everyday people. Flutterwave has helped us ensure that from the start.”
“We’ve been together since day 1. Flutterwave’s infrastructure gave us the stability and flexibility we needed to serve users across Nigeria, and more importantly, the reach to scale outside the country without building everything from scratch. That level of support has been crucial to our ability to stay focused on Africans, the tool to build long-term wealth from the ground up,” he added.
Good to Know
As Africa’s leading payment technology company with infrastructure coverage in over 60% of the continent, we understand our critical role as an ecosystem enabler and remain committed to creating value for enterprise merchants across different verticals. As a result, Flutterwave is excited and proud to be the payment partner for Bamboo’s newly launched cross-border money transfer solution, Misan By Bamboo. It is another testament to our commitment to providing our esteemed merchants with the solution they need to achieve their immediate and long-term business goals.
Ready to launch your product or expand your operation in Africa? Talks to us.