Dear reader,
The Realistic Optimist recently spoke with Richmond Bassey, the co-founder of Bamboo, a Nigerian fintech startup.
Currently sporting over 2M users, Bamboo has enabled many African retail investors to invest in public equities (US & Nigeria) and fixed-income products (ie: bonds) for the first-time.
According to Richmond, Africa houses 373M people with investable income. They've still got a long way to go.
In this exclusive RO interview (clocking in at 4,000+ words), we discuss:
- Bamboo's genesis
- Bamboo's original & current tech + legal 'stack'
- How Bamboo manages USD - Naira conversions for its users
- Why Bamboo opened Nigerian stock market investing (and the reasons behind the Nigerian stock market's recent boom)
- Richmond's view & advice on regulatory matters
- Bamboo's B2B arm
- Bamboo's growth strategy
... and much more.
Please enjoy.
Biography
Richmond Bassey is the co-founder and CEO of Bamboo, a Nigerian fintech startup.
Founded in 2019, Bamboo enables African retail investors to invest in US stocks, Nigerian stocks, Naira savings, and fixed-income products such as Nigerian treasury bills and USD fixed return. They also launched a B2B vertical to enable institutional investors and corporates to utilize its infrastructure.
In 2022, Bamboo raised a $15M Series A. Bamboo operates in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, and is preparing its expansion to Kenya. Bamboo has 2.3M users (40% of which are active investors) and has processed over $1.3B since inception.
Prior to Bamboo, Richmond was chief of staff at Helium Health, a leading Nigerian healthtech startup.
What problem is Bamboo solving?
I’m part of a specific class of Nigerians: urban, young, digitally-savvy, with disposable income I want to invest.
When I started thinking about Bamboo, the Nigerian stock market was still reeling from the 2008 financial crisis and its performance was weak. In 2019, yields on Nigerian government bonds crashed. Compounded with the Naira’s depreciation, most forms of local investing were either disappointing or a loss-making venture for Nigerian retail investors.
My friends in the UK had access to platforms like Robinhood and Freetrade, which enabled them to invest in the US stock market. I wanted to invest in it too, but couldn’t do so from Nigeria.
I sought to understand why. I realized that there weren’t any laws barring Nigerians from holding foreign securities. Rather, the infrastructure to facilitate such transactions didn’t exist.
My co-founder and I spent 12-18 months figuring out the legal, technological, and operational framework that would make this possible. We launched Bamboo in October 2019.
What was the “stack” you needed in order to launch Bamboo?