Zege Technologies was co-founded by Stella Njoki where she is also the Head of Operations. She says Zege Technologies was founded with a key focus in helping organisations embrace mobile money and digitize operations for growth.
Even though they had this clear vision, most of the banks they thought they could catch became so rigid because Zege Technologies was a startup, the banks did not know who they were and they only dealt with established companies.
“Resilience overtime taught us to shift our products, to be able to curve a niche in the market,” Stella Njoki says.
When they realized that banks wouldn’t take their products as fast as they wanted them to, they decided to start working with businesses and with M-PESA directly. That is how they started to do Pay Bill integration for businesses. They realized that working with businesses was not as challenging as working with the banks. When they started making a name for themselves, small saccos started accepting them.
“Just as in any other business, you need to study your market,” Stella Njoki reiterates. They noticed that the market had started to crowd, with a huge interest towards them as a software house, not just as a payment business.
“It is important as entrepreneurs to at times judge based on the needs that people have towards you,” she adds. They started getting a lot of feedback from their market based on the quality of products they were producing. Zege Technologies at the time decided to run the payment part of the business as well as become a fully-fledged software development company.
This was 3-4 years ago and that is where their breakthrough came from, because they saw that there was a need in the market. There were so many people who came to them, they had ideas and money but they didn’t have quality developers.
Quality vis-à-vis getting reliable, dependable developers was hard. So, they added consultancy at Zege Technologies as one of their services to bridge the gap that was lacking, of quality developers. They are however still running M PAYER which is their payment platform.