Wiza Jalakasi
Director, Africa Expansion at EBANX
Wiza Jalakasi
Director, Africa Expansion at EBANX
Johannesburg Metropolitan Area
Overview
Work Experience
Director, Africa Expansion
2023 - Current
Started to lead Africa regional expansion for Ebanx - a Brazilian headquartered payments processor with operations in 29 countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Events Lead, Africa
2021
Bringing together Africa's finest fintech minds for evenings of celebrations, collaborations and conversations. Learn more at fintechhappyhour.com
VP, Global Merchant Business
2021 - 2023
- Led and completed Chipper Cash integration for Twitter Tips - Twitter’s first integration of its kind in Africa. - Led a product and sales team building out a merchant facing API to allow merchants and payment aggregators from all over the world to access 6m+ Chipper Cash wallets and several other alternative payment methods, launching in 2022 with $15m+ processed in the first year; and led sales efforts for pursuing 100+ more global merchant leads. - Sourced and coordinated Chipper’s 2022 acquisition of Zoona in Zambia to operationalise Chipper in the market rapidly. - Led and managed regulatory engagement between Chipper and central banks in Malawi, Mauritius, Zambia and Ethiopia.
Head of Global BD & Strategy
2019 - 2020
- Reimagining fundamental ideas around USSD and other mobile network operator services to make them more exciting and relevant for smartphone developers in emerging markets. - Led BD efforts across pipeline securing $XXk ACV contracts with telco and bank partners, including deals for automated end to end USSD testing for telcos in South Africa and Kenya.
International Expansion Lead
2018 - 2019
Led Expansion team into discovery and growth for SMS, USSD, Voice, Payments, Airtime, IoT and data APIs covering a total of 17 African countries serving 25,000+ users and 5,000+ businesses, 50m+ daily API calls and generating $10m+ AR.
Business Development Lead
2016 - 2018
Scaling incredibly powerful SMS, USSD, voice, airtime and payments APIs to thousands of software developers across 7 African countries. Favourite wins: -Setup of Malawi office from scratch to $XXk+ AR with a team of 3 -Spearheading operator relations for Tanzania office to integrate across all major operators -Led competitive analysis for $8.6m Series A investment into Africa's Talking led by International Finance Corporation, participation from Orange Digital Ventures and Better Ventures
Cofounder & COO
2014 - 2016
- Developed business strategy and pitch that raised $30k investment from Savannah Fund - Modified PHP MachForm for use as an end-to-end MVP to generate revenue - Devised logistics for mobile payments system to verify/track rewards for hundreds of respondents - Designed logos, corporate stationery, website, pitch decks and all marketing material - Managed + administrated business ops to ensure company was operationally complaint at all times
Founder & CEO
2009 - 2013
Built MwTunes (http://mwtunes.com/) - Malawi’s first ever music download site targeting mobile devices. 3G Internet had just started to grow in Malawi and we were gaining traction. Downloads were free and we planned to make money with ad revenue. At our peak we had 10,000 unique visitors per month, but there was no opportunity to make money from ad revenue because people in the country just weren’t familiar with the concept yet. The rest of the local industry caught up about 4 years later.