# This App Will Change How You Handle Money Forever — Maame Abrema Quarm (Ladder)

An episode of [The Peswa Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1781537541), 19 Oct 2025, 1 h 12 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/110e1ce70/podcast/play/117753086/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2026-2-31%2F421135820-44100-1-9e7ccf563d98e7da.mp3

Send a text This will change how you handle money — forever. Maame Abrema Quarm built Ladder, an AI-powered finance app with one audacious goal: make financial freedom actually possible for everyday Africans. In this deeply practical and honest conversation on The Peswa Podcast, Maame walks us through the friction, and the product choices that turned a bold idea into a fintech grounded in real user problems. Learn more about Maame and Ladder in this episode Simplify cross-border payments with WeWire — the smarter way for businesses to send and receive payments in local and international currencies across 80+ countries. Empower your business with fast, secure, and seamless global transactions. 🔗 Start today at WeWire.com Click the link below to support the show—every bit of support goes straight into helping us create even better content, reach more people, and share more incredible conversations. Support the show (click here) -- https://www.buzzsprout.com/2423582/support 📩 Connect with us: • Follow Bill on Instagram: @billcobbinah • Follow us on all socials: @thepeswa 📢 Subscribe The Peswa on all Platforms: https://linktr.ee/thepeswa Get access to amazing royalty-free music for your projects — sign up for an Uppbeat account using the referral link: https://share.uppbeat.io/cy9fcqqxj4tg Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more conversations like this! The Fresh Patch Podcast - Where Good Pets Get It. Welcome to the Fresh Patch Podcast where we talk about everything, from dog... Listen on: Apple Podcasts Support the show

## Transcript

[0:00] I think over the period you 100 X your revenue or something like
[0:03] that, you know that, how do I know that?
[0:05] I started a ladder from a place of believing that a lot of the
[0:08] solutions on the market were based on providing access.
[0:11] What does ladder do for me as a regular Ganian?
[0:13] So the question really is, how do you know that you don't have
[0:16] enough when you don't even have any visibility of what you do
[0:19] have? We hope to provoke that kind of
[0:21] mindset shit that allows people to make small, small decisions
[0:26] with their money that overall leads to very big and impactful
[0:29] outcomes. How have you managed to pull
[0:31] that? Off Pull it off.
[0:33] Why do you knew Ladder? I don't know.
[0:34] Can you guess? Absolutely, yeah.
[0:36] It was really something I wanted to build because I felt like it
[0:38] should exist. I never thought of it as a
[0:40] business. If I had known all the things
[0:42] that I knew after I started, I probably would not have done it.
[0:46] There's a certain level of access that you can empower
[0:49] yourself to have when it comes to money, and you don't need to
[0:52] make the most amount. You just need to make enough to
[0:54] get you to the next best step. Then to go with that
[0:57] incrementally, like our goal is to make this the smartest bank
[1:00] you've ever used and hopefully the only one you ever need.
[1:03] I really need to know who's feeding you this information.
[1:05] Like your research is so deep. Hello community and thanks for
[1:16] tuning again. It's a great conversation.
[1:18] The conversation about this is a great conversation with my mayor
[1:21] Abrima Quam. My mayor is the CEO and Co
[1:24] founder Ladder a lot of Africa. They're essentially A wealth
[1:27] management platform helping people to save and invest and
[1:31] manage their expenses. Great conversation.
[1:33] We touched on her journey from her childhood to going to Ivy
[1:37] League school, coming back to Ghana and like as I'm Muncha
[1:41] remains just build something and I hope you enjoyed the
[1:43] conversation. Thanks.
[1:45] Thanks for coming number. One thanks for having me.
[1:47] Yeah, you're so you're stressed out a little.
[1:49] No, I'm sorry I stressed you out.
[1:52] But then you're total header, I think it speaks to what in some
[1:57] regard you're trying to do with other parts in the people's
[2:00] pockets. Yes.
[2:02] What does that mean to you as a person?
[2:06] So I think for me fundamentally it's about empowerment.
[2:10] And I always say that I started Ladder from a place of believing
[2:15] that a lot of the solutions on the market, we're based on
[2:18] providing access. So it's based on sort of
[2:21] digitizing the existing financial services that we
[2:24] already have on ground. You can save, you can invest,
[2:27] but to me, the real power of technology is being able to
[2:30] enable people to do things that they couldn't do before or that
[2:34] they would have had a hard time figuring out on their own.
[2:37] So from the very beginning, Ladder has always been about
[2:40] providing technology and intelligence as a layer of
[2:44] empowerment. And I think now with the rise of
[2:47] AI, everyone is seeing in real time what that looks like.
[2:51] You can literally just ask it anything really, to help you
[2:57] have a goal, to help you reach a goal that you have.
[3:00] And that's what we're trying to do with Ladder, is to fill in
[3:03] the gaps that people have when it comes to finances and
[3:07] actually enable them to make decisions that are best for
[3:10] themselves. OK, so assuming I'm the my first
[3:14] time hearing about ladder, right?
[3:16] And so someone is watching this and they hear this is the first
[3:19] time you've heard of ladder, Probably you've seen your
[3:21] commercial somewhere. But then they're not exactly
[3:23] sure what Ladder is about. And here you are the one who
[3:27] builds ladder, right? What is Ladder about?
[3:29] Because he said you're trying to fill in the gaps with people
[3:32] against economic empowerment. How exactly are you doing that?
[3:35] What does ladder do for me as a regular guy in, you know?
[3:39] Hello friends. A quick pause before we continue
[3:41] the conversation. If you're enjoying this
[3:42] conversation, kindly hit the subscribe button.
[3:45] Also, do well to share this episode with a friend and if
[3:48] possible, leave a comment in the comment section.
[3:50] This goes a long way to help the team and motivates us to bring
[3:52] you great content every week. Now to the conversation.
[3:55] So Ladder is an all in one personal finance platform where
[3:59] we want users to be able to manage and grow their money all
[4:02] in one place with the help of artificial intelligence.
[4:05] To break this down, how we help users do this is by planning for
[4:09] their financial goals, being able to save, invest budgets and
[4:12] track their expenses, but all of this under the umbrella of an
[4:16] artificial intelligence that's personalized to them.
[4:19] So there's this idea that once you have all your money in one
[4:21] place, there's now a basis point to have intelligence over who
[4:26] you are as a person financially and help you actually make the
[4:30] next best steps and the next best decisions for you on your
[4:33] finances. And we have based on this Our
[4:36] Lady AI who is our in house AI system.
[4:39] This lady because you're you, a lady or.
[4:42] Not because I'm a lady, but you know, ladder lady.
[4:46] We wanted to have, like, a Siri vibe where it's like, it's a bit
[4:51] ambiguous, you know, Is it a robot?
[4:54] Is it a lady? But also because women tend to
[4:56] be nurtures and tend to be helpful.
[4:59] OK, Yeah. It's a lot of sense.
[5:00] I'm excited about where you're building because I think I heard
[5:04] you see on one interview that Ladder started off with a
[5:07] mission of to accelerate economic empowerment for
[5:10] Africans, right? And I think it's a very big
[5:12] conversation over the core you try to achieve with this podcast
[5:15] is to I mean, the end goal is that the people will hear
[5:18] conversations like these and having certain mindset shifts
[5:23] regards economic empowerment, because we believe there was a
[5:26] wave in the 60s, a political wave, political empowerment,
[5:30] political independence. But as a continent, as a bloc,
[5:34] economically speaking, you know, there's very little to write to
[5:37] him about, right? So it's really exciting to hear
[5:41] that, you know, you're building things like this to kind of help
[5:44] us achieve that. Is that is that a thinking?
[5:48] I think absolutely. And I love that you talked about
[5:50] a mindset shift because I think for a lot of us, we shift our
[5:55] mindsets not by making drastic changes, but making systemic
[5:59] changes, by making little, little decisions day by day that
[6:03] inch us closer to the type of people that we want to be.
[6:06] And that's exactly what Ladder is all about, fundamentally be
[6:09] built for the type of person that doesn't want to have to
[6:13] figure it out. And that was a very big
[6:15] inspiration for me because I felt that, hey, like right now,
[6:19] if I wanted to get serious with my money, I'm going to download
[6:23] 3 to 4 apps. I'm gonna have to set up some
[6:24] kind of spreadsheets and we need to do a lot of research.
[6:28] There's very few people in the population that fit the bill of
[6:32] that like book long person that's like on Investopedia and
[6:36] it's attending conferences and webinars.
[6:38] And so we wanted to build for the type of person that just
[6:41] needs it to be so easy that it's in their face and it's pretty
[6:44] much done for them. And so even part of the
[6:47] principles that we use in our product development is this
[6:50] framework that I mentioned of your next best step, whereby our
[6:53] AI, by analyzing what you're doing on regular basis or what
[6:57] your goals are, what you're actually doing is able to
[7:00] actually suggest to you. Not recommend and say, hey, do
[7:03] this, but just suggest to you, hey, you might want to consider
[7:06] doing X or you might want to make it shift in Y.
[7:09] Because when it's up front and personal in your face, at least
[7:13] you have that reminder. And we say this in house like
[7:17] everybody needs a plug. So it's not to necessarily say
[7:21] that, OK, with this app like all of your problems are going to go
[7:24] away, but more so that we hope to provoke that kind of mindset
[7:28] shift that allows people to make small, small decisions with
[7:34] their money that overall leads to very big and impactful
[7:37] outcomes. Yeah, interesting.
[7:41] There's this. So far I got the things you've
[7:45] touched on, like what's what 1 can do when they have the money,
[7:49] you know, Yeah, when you have the money to make decisions on
[7:53] the money, what can I what, how to, how do I save my money?
[7:57] What do I hedge my money against?
[7:59] What do I put my money? What as such and I can acquire.
[8:02] But there's just another strand of economic empowerment where
[8:07] people have to get the money. Yeah, there's a stream.
[8:09] They have to set up a stream, whether it's getting a job or,
[8:13] you know, people who have jobs doing other things to bring in
[8:15] money. Are you guys addressing that as
[8:18] well? Is that part of the
[8:19] conversation? Absolutely.
[8:21] And it's something that we've talked about from this lens of
[8:27] we believe in holistic financial empowerment.
[8:30] We believe that. We believe that personal finance
[8:31] is personal. But one interesting thing is
[8:36] when we first started, like before we even had a name, I did
[8:39] a survey and I spoke to about 50 to 60 people on interviews.
[8:45] And then I then did a actual consecutive survey with about
[8:48] 500 plus respondents. And the data was very
[8:51] interesting because over 80% of people were saying that they are
[8:57] not investing, they're not saving their money.
[8:59] When you ask why, the overwhelming response is I don't
[9:03] have enough money to save. I don't have enough money to
[9:05] invest. I don't have enough money to
[9:07] even like do anything really. And then when you go to the
[9:13] question of you filter by the people that responded to these
[9:16] things in this way and you go to the question of, OK, are you
[9:19] tracking your finances in any way?
[9:22] Are you managing any type of budget?
[9:24] 90% plus are like, no. So the question really is, how
[9:27] do you know that you don't have enough when you don't even have
[9:31] any visibility of what you do have?
[9:34] Say you're not starting from zero and you do have something,
[9:36] you're making 500 CDs. Where's that 500 CDs going to on
[9:40] a regular basis? Because that data can tell you
[9:42] something about who you are right now.
[9:46] And then again, data as well tells you, you want to be here.
[9:50] So then what's the gap between where you want to be and where
[9:52] you are right now? And how do you fill that gap?
[9:56] And so we see ladder as a bridge between these two data points
[9:59] fundamentally. And it's not just about saying
[10:02] to people, OK, you just need to save.
[10:03] You just need to invest like find something, anything and do
[10:06] that. But it's more so about saying
[10:09] your data is telling you a very particular story, and we need to
[10:13] be able to bridge that. Something that we even say in
[10:15] the office is that at a certain point in time, getting another
[10:19] stream of income is financial advice, like telling someone
[10:22] they need to upskill, they need to consider moving careers.
[10:26] All of that is part of the picture of what your finances
[10:30] look like. And that's something that any
[10:32] reputable financial advisor will tell you based on whatever goals
[10:35] you have. And that's something that if you
[10:37] ask, I'm pretty sure if you ask Lady AI today and you say, hey,
[10:40] this is how much I'm making, I want to save XYZ.
[10:43] One of the things Lady AI is going to tell you is you
[10:45] probably need to see if you can start selling some things, see
[10:48] if you can get another job and things of that nature.
[10:52] So that is something we want to address, not just for the sake
[10:55] of. We want people to come and be
[10:58] investing their money on the platform, But from again, this
[11:01] notion that personal finance fundamentally has to be
[11:04] holistic. And that's why from the very
[11:06] beginning, from the top down with Ladder, we're not just
[11:09] trying to be 1 type of app, but hopefully we want to, in the
[11:14] long run, touch all the very major touch points that a normal
[11:18] person's finances would touch so that we can see how to assist
[11:23] them live a holistic life without chasing several
[11:26] different apps and resources and platforms.
[11:30] Interesting. And so yeah, I'm hoping
[11:34] hopefully one day I can come on later and find a job
[11:37] opportunity. Did you get my point?
[11:39] It's like if Lady AI can advise me on what I can do with my
[11:43] money and tell me, Oh well, if I need to achieve this financial
[11:46] goal, I have to do this one. So then probably there is a
[11:51] vertical somewhere, somewhere along your product lines.
[11:53] That's okay. Well, this opportunity is
[11:56] available. Given the credentials you have,
[11:58] you could apply for this role. You know, like something like
[12:01] that. That's so interesting.
[12:02] And I think that's something that we had talked about earlier
[12:04] or not necessarily from a platform perspective, but from a
[12:07] community perspective. Last year, we had what we call
[12:11] latter week, which is usually in the 3rd or 4th week of November.
[12:14] And it's just a series of programming that we do for our
[12:17] community. And one of the particularly
[12:20] successful events was called Surviving Accra and Everyone.
[12:25] And we had such a positive response from that.
[12:28] People asked for different things.
[12:29] And it's something that we've looked at to doing small group
[12:32] community events that are really speaking to what those in our
[12:35] community and our audience and user base need.
[12:39] Career is one of them, investing is another.
[12:41] Even something like immigration and moving out of Ghana is
[12:46] actually something that a lot of people that are interested in.
[12:48] So from a community programming perspective, that's definitely
[12:51] something that we're open to partnering with other people to
[12:54] do and potentially even having like different sort of platforms
[12:58] that can address that. It's really important to us
[13:00] though, that we're not trying to overcrowd the app and say, OK,
[13:03] this is a super app that you can do literally every single thing
[13:06] on. But the idea is really for that
[13:09] is to be a gateway to other things that empower 1
[13:11] financially. So some of the things we don't
[13:14] even do now, for example, is like insurance and pension.
[13:17] But we do hope that somewhere along our road map we're able to
[13:20] incorporate things like insurance, pension, even credit
[13:23] based on what you're doing on ladder and what you need.
[13:27] OK, 2021, you had graduated from Columbia University, an Ivy
[13:34] League school, international relations and political science.
[13:38] Yes, October 2025, here you are, CEO of a wealth management
[13:44] platform, so to speak, of a fintech.
[13:46] Quite the switch. Did you always know you're going
[13:49] to do this even when you were going for doing this and you're
[13:52] doing your undergrad? Do you know, like I didn't
[13:57] always know, but looking back, the dots connected in such a
[14:02] linear way that is actually quite staggering.
[14:05] So for example, one of the things that I did even before I
[14:08] went to uni was a chassis AIX, a chassis innovation experience.
[14:12] And it's like this two week long summer camp where they promote
[14:16] innovation through entrepreneurship, engineering,
[14:19] robotics, creative arts. That's actually where I met
[14:21] Grace and I did entrepreneurship and one of the things that we
[14:26] built was a sort of like college applications app that was meant
[14:30] to help people just streamline the applications between them
[14:34] and their parents. I remember it was quite, I think
[14:36] it was quite like uni buddy or something.
[14:38] We actually ended up winning that challenge.
[14:39] I was so happy. And I remember I checked my
[14:42] messages from like 2016 with my mentor at the time.
[14:46] I checked it like last year and I said to them, oh, I want to
[14:49] build apps. I want to build really cool
[14:50] things that help people and solve problems.
[14:53] And I completely forgot about that.
[14:55] And as you probably knew growing up in Africa, it's like you are
[14:59] going to do like law or medicine, maybe like engineering
[15:04] or finance. But I really did not know what I
[15:06] wanted to do. So at first it was like, OK, I
[15:09] might do chemical engineering, OK, I might do sustainable
[15:12] development. It was very random things.
[15:15] But thankfully, because I went to a liberal arts school, I was
[15:18] really able to curate my curriculum to my interest.
[15:21] So some of the things that I studied were like human computer
[15:25] interaction, human centered design, design thinking and
[15:28] innovation type of courses. And then throughout actually
[15:31] from the summer I graduated high school up until I graduated,
[15:35] every single summer I interned at different startups that were
[15:39] solving problems like this. And I love the energy.
[15:41] Like I love the sort of new age where building tech, everyone is
[15:45] pretty young. No one is over 35, no offense to
[15:49] people over 35, but I just really enjoyed that type of
[15:54] energy and the energy that I even experienced at A and that
[15:58] really stuck with me. In summer 2019, I interned at
[16:02] APR and strategic communications firm in New York and it was very
[16:06] corporate, it was very stratified, different levels.
[16:09] I was doing like I was doing work that AI is probably doing
[16:12] now. And I remember just thinking I
[16:14] need to do something a lot more impactful when I graduate.
[16:17] I can't be in a low impact role. So those are some of the things
[16:22] that informed my thinking. And then I still didn't actually
[16:28] know that this is where I was going to end of.
[16:30] But what happened in March 2021 was that I think it was Flutter
[16:36] Wave had raised a Series B or so.
[16:38] They had raised like a ridiculous amount of money.
[16:41] There was a lot of attention on the African fintech ecosystem.
[16:44] Paystock had gotten acquired a few months prior by Stripe, and
[16:48] there were these up and coming names like Piggy Vest and Invest
[16:51] Bamboo and Bankley. And I was thinking to myself,
[16:54] this is really interesting. And that's when this idea of,
[16:57] OK, but these are all just platforms that are replicating
[17:00] the same things I'm seeing here in America.
[17:02] But really and truly, I felt that there was an opportunity
[17:05] for something more, you know, and the idea for ladders started
[17:08] coming to me and it just sort of became a rabbit hole that I went
[17:12] down on literally from April 2021 up until me being here
[17:16] today. So I think it was a series of
[17:18] events that kept making the path get clearer and clearer in terms
[17:23] of what it was that I wanted to do.
[17:26] And I'm always sort of able to look back at the things that I
[17:30] feel like I'm naturally good at and I have a natural affinity
[17:33] for and then connect those things into what it is that I
[17:37] want to do now. So with Ladder the the the 1st
[17:42] feeling was that it was going to be sort of like an experimental
[17:45] project, OK. It was really something I wanted
[17:47] to build because I felt like it should exist.
[17:49] I never thought of it as a business and over time I had to
[17:52] start thinking of it as a business and that was a very
[17:55] rude awakening. Why, what?
[17:57] What cost the space? Should mine say it's in that
[17:59] regard money to stay afloat? Yes, because you do need money
[18:04] to run a sustainable business. There's this thing that people
[18:08] say that first time founders focus on the product and second
[18:12] time founders focus on distribution and like marketing
[18:15] and growth. And I think I was very much that
[18:17] first time founder that I just wanted to see it exist, right?
[18:22] And I came up in the 2021 funding cycle.
[18:27] So just that post COVID funding cycle where there was so much
[18:29] venture capital flowing in. And I managed to get one Angel
[18:33] check that helped me start. No, talk about $100.
[18:37] It was about $30,000, OK. And that helped me start.
[18:42] And I think in my head, I just felt like, OK, it was so easy to
[18:44] raise that first 80K. So I'm just gonna like be
[18:46] cruising on this until I figure it out.
[18:49] And then it was not as all like funding just collapsed, funding
[18:54] just dried up. But then I just really needed to
[18:58] see this thing exist. And so it just became a fighting
[19:02] battle of how do I actually at this time, build a business that
[19:07] is investment ready and then from that point on, keep
[19:10] bootstrapping so I can keep this thing afloat so that I can get
[19:13] to this thesis that I want to see proven, which Even so today
[19:18] it has not fully manifested, but we are still working on building
[19:23] that and we're still building up the distribution engine to be
[19:27] able to achieve those goals. The thing about our type of
[19:30] business model though, is that it's the type of thing that you
[19:32] need to hit a critical mass of scale.
[19:35] So every single thing before you hit that is just like fighting
[19:38] to stay alive, being smart, being tactical about capital
[19:41] allocation to actually stay afloat until you hit that
[19:44] critical mass of scale, whether that is funded or that is by
[19:48] your own like might. Yeah.
[19:51] So I think for me it was really like it was, it was less about,
[19:58] OK, I just, I'm just trying to build this thing to more of OK,
[20:05] like this thing actually now needs to be a sustainable
[20:08] business. And I had to switch my mindset
[20:12] around that because it's being a sustainable business is what is
[20:15] going to allow it to fully manifest in the way that I have
[20:18] envisioned it, if that makes sense.
[20:20] Yeah, I gathered that it got to a stage where it actually
[20:25] started doing things means I don't scale, you know, calling
[20:27] customers, trying to convince them with your marketing
[20:30] associates. I think over the period you 100
[20:33] X your revenue or something like that.
[20:36] How did you know that? How did I know that?
[20:39] So, so that's that's fair. Like you had like you've been
[20:44] able to build a sustainable business, but I think on your
[20:47] from your profile or what was it called LinkedIn, not LinkedIn,
[20:52] this funding platform news account.
[20:54] I've seen like a couple of like really good investors on your
[20:56] cap table. And so like you've raised some
[20:59] good funding you went to in the tech stars program.
[21:03] So First off, I have two questions, right?
[21:05] It's with tied to like funding in our markets because founders
[21:09] struggle to raise capital in our market.
[21:11] It's it's terrible, it's gruelling.
[21:14] I've seen people who have like build great businesses, they
[21:16] want to scale, but then just access to funding.
[21:19] And it's more so tied to the fact that they are in the
[21:21] African markets. Yeah, right.
[21:23] Absolutely. Yeah.
[21:24] And so you've raised capital. How much have you external
[21:26] capital? Just give us a ball pack.
[21:29] I think externally it's probably north of $200,000.
[21:32] We actually haven't raised that much, yeah.
[21:35] Yeah. And then how have you managed to
[21:38] pull that off? A word of.
[21:40] Raising external capital because we both agree that, you know,
[21:44] the funding landscape dried up since 2021.
[21:48] I mean, it's picking up a little, you know, it's coming
[21:51] back kind of thing. I wouldn't say not really for
[21:54] very early stage companies. To be fair.
[21:57] Even the goal posts keep shifting.
[21:59] When I was first coming up, you can raise on.
[22:03] I raised my first check with literally a Notion document.
[22:05] I did not have a prototype, I didn't have a slide deck,
[22:07] nothing. And you could raise pre product
[22:10] pre revenue. Right now people can tell you
[22:12] that, hey, for a pre seed, I need to be seeing like $50,000
[22:16] in revenue. Like it's crazy.
[22:20] But I think so the very first person that gave us a very first
[22:22] check, one of the things she said to me was that generally
[22:26] access to capital in this market is a lot less than in other
[22:30] markets, obviously. And so because of that, those
[22:33] who do have capital here are a lot more, let's call it
[22:38] conscientious about where and how they allocate that capital
[22:42] because they have a lot less to just spray and pray.
[22:45] So they're going to have a lot more terms.
[22:47] They're going to have a lot more, you know, thresh a lot
[22:49] higher, higher thresholds for investment.
[22:52] And so that's something that I always came back to this idea
[22:55] that I needed to just figure it out and do it by myself.
[23:00] And there was always that kind of pressure and a strategy that
[23:04] I did at Dobbs very early on was realizing I was talking to the
[23:07] wrong people. And that's something that I do
[23:09] see. I think I said that at the event
[23:11] that I met you at was like you have to really know who you're
[23:14] talking to. If you're talking to a fund that
[23:18] is very structured that are going to have like investment
[23:21] committee meetings and several months of review and DD, If
[23:25] you're pre revenue, that's probably not going to work out
[23:27] well for you. They're going to come back and
[23:29] say you're too early for us. If you're talking to somebody
[23:32] that's like a whale and has invested in companies like yours
[23:36] before, someone that you know, you're going to have a lot
[23:41] shorter of a lead time to a decision.
[23:43] And they're also going to, they're more likely to be a bit
[23:47] less risk, a bit more, a bit less risk of this.
[23:50] Yeah. So for us, we started talking to
[23:53] the kind of people that would be like LP's.
[23:55] It was more so. Okay, introduce me to your Angel
[23:57] investors. And actually tapping into our
[24:00] own network to see who could connect us to somebody that
[24:05] could potentially give us a check.
[24:06] And we took small checks, like we took 10K checks here, 15K
[24:10] checks there, you know, 25 K checks.
[24:12] I think the biggest check we took before techs, I was
[24:15] probably about 50K. And it was interesting because
[24:20] notoriously the people that give you the lease money tend to
[24:23] stress you out the most. So that's also another dynamic
[24:28] that comes. Out a story to tell, yeah.
[24:30] Oh, that's a story for another team, but that's another dynamic
[24:34] that also comes out of taking some of these checks.
[24:36] So very early on, I also did become a bit wary of that for
[24:40] that reason. I've also kept a very small
[24:42] team. To this day, our team has never
[24:44] been, it has never crossed 20. I think briefly this year it
[24:48] went past 15. But keeping a small team,
[24:51] keeping the barren loo and really allocating capital to the
[24:54] things that matter the most has also to help us at least survive
[24:57] up until this point, yeah. Yeah, OK.
[25:00] I'm going to zoom out of Ladda a little bit.
[25:03] Face of what? Why do you need Ladda?
[25:05] I don't need. Can you guess?
[25:10] Climbing to the top. Yeah, it was a tool to help you
[25:13] climb, a tool that empowers you to go from one stage to another.
[25:18] I. See.
[25:19] Yeah, that's. Interesting.
[25:21] It's interesting because it's a ladder.
[25:23] It's not like an elevator like you do have to, you do have to
[25:26] do. Some work legwork, yeah.
[25:28] Now you look at like the ladder with like some yellow dot at the
[25:31] top, Yes, what the yellow dot gold pot of gold or?
[25:34] It's a lady. Oh lady is a gold dot.
[25:37] Yes, I see what I was thinking. But it's also you sort of going
[25:42] up the steps. Oh, OK.
[25:44] Yeah, I. Remember I spoke to Kobe Iwa and
[25:49] he runs Campi Holdings to a similar module.
[25:51] You tell me. Oh, the so they have to say a
[25:54] black bees with a gold top or the blue bees with the gold top.
[25:59] And then a gold is like, you know, when you go to the apex
[26:01] and it's yeah, so that was the same thing when I saw your logo
[26:03] and I seemed thinking I had. But anyway, zoning out of Ladda
[26:06] begin come back to Ladda the text that experience and what
[26:10] what building the team has done and what's the future looks like
[26:12] for Ladda. You mentioned growing up in
[26:14] Africa, right? And how there are certain
[26:17] expectations and what they have to come, a lawyer or an
[26:20] engineer, you know. And you mentioned that during
[26:23] high school you were intending during high school, we were
[26:26] intending the summer in like organisations.
[26:28] I'm wondering which high school did you go to?
[26:30] I went to a Roman Ridge school. And they allowed you to do
[26:32] internships. They actually facilitated
[26:35] internships for us, so I got to do different things.
[26:38] That's one of the reasons I knew, for example, that I could
[26:40] never be a doctor because 1 summer I was at a hospital.
[26:44] My best friend, she's actually a doctor now.
[26:46] So I just followed her and it was so traumatic.
[26:50] And then I also interned in a bank, didn't like his at all.
[26:54] So I remember they were very good about policing us in
[26:57] different places just to get a feel of it.
[26:59] I mean, you're in high school, so it's not necessarily an
[27:02] internship. You're mostly doing shadow work,
[27:05] but the exposure is very good for at least narrowing down what
[27:08] you like and what you don't like.
[27:10] So for me, it was always a process of eliminating.
[27:12] In fact, actually this summer we took in interns for Boomer Ridge
[27:15] as well because I just thought it would make a lot of sense to
[27:19] expose the kids in school now to technology as a field,
[27:23] especially the way that we do it.
[27:24] That ladder. Yeah.
[27:26] That speaks it looks like the kind of dent we have in
[27:29] education system, you know, because most of us still have
[27:31] the privilege of going to remember just like a Apache long
[27:35] top tier school, you know, clearly, and so there's some
[27:38] exposure to these things. It helps you make like you said,
[27:40] by elimination. You tried this, take it up, but
[27:43] you know, in terms of our kids are going to like Coconutenia
[27:46] been quiet and things. No.
[27:47] But you know, one of the most impactful things I actually did
[27:50] at Roman Bridge was this program by Lancaster University called
[27:54] the Business Cup Challenge. I mean.
[27:56] You got to be part of the challenge because of Roman.
[27:59] Rage no. So that's, that's the point I
[28:01] was coming to. There were about 200 schools in
[28:03] the Business Club Challenge and the top ten schools, part of the
[28:08] top ten schools were actually schools that were represented by
[28:11] the local system. So we went against like Wesley
[28:14] Girls, there was in Phantom and there were other schools from
[28:17] the local Ghanaian system that were also a part of it.
[28:20] I mean, we ended up winning. I don't think it was because it
[28:25] was exclusively because of Roman rage.
[28:29] Funny enough, in our year, we were probably the youngest in
[28:31] the set because I was in Form 5 at the time.
[28:34] But usually they would take the upper six students, so those in
[28:36] their final, final year of high school would be competing.
[28:39] So we were about the youngest in the competition, but I think we
[28:43] had a very good team and we had a really solid idea.
[28:46] Funny enough, it was also a technology product that we had
[28:49] to conceptualize and work on. And so these are some of the
[28:53] things that I see when I see like the doors connected,
[28:55] looking back, it's like doing something like that.
[28:58] At the time, what we came up with is called the holler strap.
[29:02] And I don't know if you ever remember, there was this one
[29:04] Coachella with Tupac performed on stage like via like a
[29:08] hologram of him. So I like took that idea and I
[29:11] was like, oh, imagine if you had like a wearables like watch that
[29:15] could do holograms and you could do all this 3D imaging and use
[29:18] it to learn and use it to FaceTime and things like that.
[29:20] So that was the product that ended up winning.
[29:24] And so I guess I say this to say that we confuse it with 200
[29:27] people. Majority of the representation
[29:30] was from the local schools. But that being said, I think
[29:33] that there could have been a bit more support because when I see
[29:37] the the output from those other schools, it was very much like,
[29:40] because I did GHS as well. It was very much like that, kind
[29:43] of like I've read this thing and I'm regurgitating it.
[29:47] I'm like just putting it out plainly.
[29:49] There was a lack of a certain like innovation and creativity,
[29:53] which I think was the edge that we got from our side.
[29:56] So I think there is a gap. I think that like students just
[30:00] need to be exposed to more of these opportunities and
[30:02] encourage Cos in our case, we were really, really encouraged
[30:05] to do it and that we could do it, yeah.
[30:09] Interesting. And even with the local
[30:11] representation you mentioned, there are certain class of
[30:13] schools, you know, Saint Augustine's College and Infante
[30:16] Payment, you know, And so it's not the everyday opportunity for
[30:20] the Ghanaian teenager, you know. So let's go back home.
[30:26] You sound like someone with like a very wild imagination and like
[30:29] you want to do things. And so it makes me wonder the
[30:31] kind of upbringing you had, whether you're the type where
[30:33] your parents are bringing you comic books to read and, you
[30:36] know, let's go back home. Do you have siblings?
[30:38] I do many siblings. I have two.
[30:40] Are you all this? I'm the I'm the middle child.
[30:44] OK, your parents are parents, entrepreneurs.
[30:46] My mom is an entrepreneur. Yeah, she's a serial
[30:50] entrepreneur. OK, you think you got that from
[30:52] here? Absolutely.
[30:54] Yeah. OK.
[30:55] I grew up watching my mom always doing stuff.
[30:57] Like, I think even they said when she was pregnant with me,
[30:59] her staff had to beg her to go home.
[31:01] She used to run restaurants on University of Ghana campus
[31:05] called Time Out. OK.
[31:07] It was really, like popular among the students.
[31:09] She was selling, like all this Chinese food and different
[31:11] continental dishes. This.
[31:13] Time Jolof is good. Yeah, actually, yes.
[31:18] And she was very active. Like, I grew up with a mom that
[31:21] was always just doing things and she always had this type of
[31:25] energy. My dad was more corporate, so he
[31:28] would be working in marketing for the most part.
[31:31] So he worked with Unileva, Guinness, a Crabberry Limited,
[31:37] and then later in his career, multimedia.
[31:39] He managed radio stations and then TV.
[31:43] So my dad is the creative actually like, and he was always
[31:46] the one, funny enough, whenever my mom was saying, OK, she's
[31:49] going to be a doctor, I need someone to take care of me.
[31:51] My old age, my dad would be like, I think I Burma is more
[31:55] like R&D, innovation, that type of thing.
[31:59] So I think between the two of them, there was always a
[32:01] balance. And I always had an ear that
[32:03] would be like, OK, but what do you actually want to do?
[32:06] Yeah. Like the core thing, the core
[32:08] value or the core mindset you've had from your parents is just
[32:12] getting up to do things. I think there was definitely the
[32:19] core mindset was not just doing things, but doing things well.
[32:23] And I've always been pushed to be a bit of a perfectionist,
[32:28] been pushed to a certain level of excellence.
[32:30] There's always that like level of criticism as well when you
[32:33] don't do as well as someone expects you to do.
[32:36] Like my dad famously said to me, you're only as good as your last
[32:39] performance, which is like, that's a crazy thing to say to a
[32:42] child. But like, there was this
[32:45] expectation of showing up and showing out regardless of
[32:49] whatever it is that you're doing.
[32:51] Yeah, at least for me. No, I'm curious.
[32:54] So you go to, you're done with Roman Reed School.
[32:57] You go to an Ivy League school, Columbia University.
[33:01] After all this exposure, you decide to do international
[33:04] relations and political science. What informed that?
[33:08] So my dad actually trained to be a diplomat because his dad was a
[33:12] diplomat. My granddad was one of the early
[33:16] diplomats in incremas time. I think because of that, he had
[33:21] a lot of stories that he would tell us.
[33:23] He would give us like all these conspiracy theories about the
[33:26] CIA and Ghana. There's a lot of just interest
[33:31] in history. I would say even in high school,
[33:33] like I famously fought to switch from economics to history at
[33:36] some point because I was just very interested in it.
[33:39] And so when I got to college and I wasn't too sure what I wanted
[33:42] to do, I just was like, OK, let me just do international
[33:46] relations because I feel like that would come naturally to me.
[33:50] And I could do that and still explore my other interests,
[33:53] which I did a lot of that. Yeah.
[33:57] At Columbia, I did classes like jazz.
[34:00] I took a semester of jazz. I took a semester of salsa, suka
[34:03] and reggae. I took a semester of West
[34:05] African history. I studied weapons of mass
[34:07] destruction. Like there was just so much to
[34:10] do. And I think I'm just naturally a
[34:12] very curious person. So I think the liberal arts
[34:16] program really encourages you to explore.
[34:19] And more so the core value of that program is that it's
[34:22] teaching you how to think and less of teaching you things.
[34:26] So how to think, how to reason, how to navigate, like living in
[34:29] this world. And so that gave me a lot of
[34:31] time to really focus on the things that mattered to me as
[34:34] well. Yeah, Yeah.
[34:36] OK, we're back to 2020. When did you leave Colombia
[34:39] again? 2021.
[34:40] We're back to 2021 Ivy League graduates, international
[34:46] relations and politics, and you decided to come back to Ghana.
[34:50] Yes. I know you work with Mazuma.
[34:52] Was it right after school? So I actually interned with
[34:54] Mazuma twice, once in I think it was 2017, right as I was going
[35:00] to university. And then in the COVID summer, so
[35:04] 2020 summer, I interned with them again.
[35:06] Yes. OK, so why did you come back?
[35:10] Because I liked it. I liked the energy, I liked
[35:13] working in a high impact role. I also didn't necessarily want
[35:16] to play the whole H1B Visa OPT game because a lot of people had
[35:22] to do that. It's a luxury.
[35:23] So there's a lot of things that you have to go through to
[35:26] actually stay in the US and I wanted a more stable environment
[35:30] for myself. But I think part of the reason,
[35:33] for example, I consider going to a chassis was I was finally
[35:36] exposed to this similar dynamic that I had in Roman Ridge, where
[35:41] it's like we are in Ghana, but there's still a level of
[35:44] creativity, there's still level of innovation.
[35:46] It's not super traditional. And so there's room for me to
[35:50] explore and be myself while being around people that look
[35:52] like me and talk like me in an environment that's comfortable
[35:55] to me. And so for me, tech in this
[36:00] space was the natural evolution of that, where it's like I'm at
[36:04] home, but I'm working on very innovative things, impactful
[36:07] things, what I believe is the frontiers of the future, but in
[36:11] an environment that matters to me because at the end of the
[36:14] day, I could work in a tech company, I could work in
[36:16] consulting somewhere. I don't feel that that work
[36:19] would be as impactful as what I'm doing here.
[36:23] And I think impact, I'm someone that impacts one of the things
[36:26] that matters the most to me in this world.
[36:29] So being able to build something that can impact people and that
[36:33] they can really value really mattered a lot to me.
[36:37] So moving to Ghana was kind of a no brainer at the time.
[36:40] I actually got a job with a Nigerian tech startup called
[36:44] Bamboo. So I was a product manager
[36:46] there. So I was able to move to Ghana,
[36:48] work remotely in Nigeria and a decent pay, live at home, not
[36:52] have to pay rent. Like everything was actually
[36:54] just for me, like being fresh out of college.
[36:57] That was the best combination I could have got and I would have
[36:59] my friends, my community. So it it, it really was not a
[37:03] difficult decision. I get asked this so many times,
[37:06] but there was never a point where it was a particularly
[37:09] challenging decision for me to make.
[37:12] You do feel it's because for, for the most part, most people,
[37:15] I mean, I've had friends who went to do undergrad in the US
[37:20] and you dare not come back home because there's a setting,
[37:26] there's no cushion economically. So there there's expectation
[37:29] from the people at home on you to pull through there and bring
[37:35] something back home. Would you say that wasn't that
[37:37] clearly that wasn't the dynamic for you and to that provide some
[37:39] sort of cushion because I mean, from what you said in your mom
[37:44] was an entrepreneur, she's doing her business, your dad is doing
[37:47] things on his own. So they're not exactly dependent
[37:49] on you. So you had room to kind of like
[37:52] explore and come back to Ghana. Would you say that's the case?
[37:56] That's a good question because even though I didn't get
[37:58] necessarily get pressure from my mom and dad, I got pressure from
[38:01] my aunts and uncles who lived there were like, what's that you
[38:03] doing? Like you should stay.
[38:05] Some of them were even encouraging me to like do
[38:07] another degree, get another student visa, just stay.
[38:13] I don't know if it's what they call like entrepreneurs
[38:15] delusion, but I genuinely didn't really think that anything could
[38:19] go wrong. Like I, I generally, I've always
[38:22] been someone that I bet on myself.
[38:23] Like I believe that once I'm doing something, it's just going
[38:26] to be, it's going to work itself out some way somehow.
[38:29] And I always say that if I had known all the things that I knew
[38:33] after I started, I probably would not have done it.
[38:38] But at the time, my parents were very supportive.
[38:40] I was like, OK, I found this rule that I think fits for what
[38:44] I want to do. So I want to use this rule to
[38:46] learn what the dynamics of the African markets are like.
[38:48] I'm going to work on ladder as well in that time, and then I'm
[38:52] going to do ladder full time. And it was just like, OK, yeah,
[38:55] you can come back home. That's fine.
[38:57] So I think that did give me a level of latitude.
[38:59] But I also think a big part of that decision was just this,
[39:06] well, the part that I haven't mentioned as well was that I had
[39:09] a very strong spiritual conviction.
[39:11] And that's something that I don't necessarily hear people
[39:13] talk about a lot. But for me, it was like there
[39:16] was a point where this decision was actually really stressing me
[39:19] out. And I was like praying.
[39:21] Like that would be the first time in my life, to be honest,
[39:23] that I've actually like prayed. And I was just kind of like, it
[39:27] was less of a prayer, more of like an awesome reason to God
[39:29] that like, listen, like there's three things I can do right now
[39:32] and you need to actually tell me like my belief in you hinges on
[39:35] you answering this question right now, like right here.
[39:38] And I think like 45 minutes after I prayed that prayer, I
[39:43] got a call from someone that was here and that person was working
[39:47] on regulatory frameworks for this market in fintech.
[39:51] Because part of my the biggest apprehension I had was like, if
[39:54] I try and do this on a regulatory level, they're just
[39:56] going to kill the business. So that person was like, yeah, I
[39:59] think this is the right time to do this.
[40:01] May not have been possible a couple of years ago, but it's
[40:04] definitely possible now. And that was just like, OK,
[40:06] boom, prayer answered. I'm just going to do this.
[40:10] And even in the time it was so strange because there were roles
[40:13] that I was recruiting for, there were so many that like for some
[40:16] reason or the other, I just wouldn't go through that.
[40:19] I ended up not liking the company.
[40:21] There was even 1 where I did like 8 interviews.
[40:24] They were giving me an offer and they were like, oops, actually
[40:27] we just got acquired. We have to resend all offers.
[40:29] And I feel like that was just like my Juno moments where God
[40:32] was like you, I told you to go and do this thing and here you
[40:36] are running away. So I'm just going to keep
[40:38] blocking it. So.
[40:39] So at that point, I was like, you know what, this is the
[40:42] conviction that I have. Everything seems set up to do is
[40:46] what's the worst that could actually happen?
[40:48] And I just took that to that chance.
[40:50] Yeah. Interesting.
[40:51] I was going to ask you about spirituality.
[40:52] I was going to ask you, I'm actually going to ask you what
[40:55] Matthew 516 means to you. Matthew 516 says to let your
[40:59] light shine so that when others see, they'll glorify your Father
[41:03] in heaven. And I think that that's really
[41:06] just For my whole life, I've tended to be the person that
[41:11] throughout my life, for some reason or the other, I always
[41:14] get given responsibility. I end up, like I said, my
[41:18] parents really impressed on me doing well and being excellent,
[41:21] but it was never something that for me was to my own benefit or
[41:27] to my own glory. I always felt like it was
[41:29] expected of me. And so when I came across
[41:32] Matthew 516, I was like, OK, yeah, like this has actually
[41:36] clicked. And it's something that came to
[41:37] me that year when I had a whole 2021 was really my year of
[41:40] spiritual like awakening. And it was something that I feel
[41:45] like God just impressed upon my heart that you're actually doing
[41:48] this for me and not yourself. So if you need a reason to be
[41:52] driven, that's it. Because funny enough, I don't
[41:55] come from a family where we were ever encouraged.
[41:57] I always like, I'm upset with my parents.
[41:59] They never give me a hustler's mindset.
[42:01] They never made me feel like, oh, I should be making money.
[42:03] I should be successful. They never really put any drive
[42:06] in us to be like materially or economically successful.
[42:11] So then it's like, what's actually motivating you when
[42:13] you're comfortable, when you don't have that hunger that
[42:17] other people have? And I think for me, that's just
[42:21] a reminder that I need to actually let my lifetime because
[42:24] it gives glory to the Lord. So is that how that's how you
[42:27] found your drive? What do you mean?
[42:29] Matthew Fashion, I mean you said because most times people who
[42:32] are entrepreneurial have a certain hunger certain.
[42:34] Yeah. So is that how you found your
[42:36] drive? I think that's what anchored it.
[42:38] That's what explained it to me because I could never really
[42:41] understand why I'm like this. Like sometimes I just like, why
[42:45] do I always have to overdo every single thing?
[42:49] Like, for example, right now I'm redoing my bedroom at home and
[42:53] something that started from like a I'm just going to get
[42:55] furniture has turned into a whole architectural project with
[42:58] so many different details. But it's like, I like seeing the
[43:02] finished work. I'm a very creative person.
[43:03] I like that. So I've always wondered, like,
[43:06] what is this thing that keeps me such a perfection is that keeps
[43:10] me like moving? What's that engine?
[43:12] Because I have it, but I just don't really know where it comes
[43:15] from, where it comes from or why it's there.
[43:17] And I think that really is my anchor.
[43:20] Yeah. I'm curious just to hire two
[43:22] siblings. Are they entrepreneur like you
[43:24] or yeah corporate CC's? Those are all, they are very
[43:29] different people. Yeah.
[43:32] My younger brother is a creative right now.
[43:34] He's doing music, has a background in computer science.
[43:40] But he's he's just a creative. He loves music.
[43:42] He's rapping, he's singing, he's doing all the things.
[43:45] My older brother is also more of a creative, but more from like a
[43:49] design, UX, marketing perspective.
[43:51] So he works with my mom and their business.
[43:54] Neither of my siblings are the way that I.
[43:58] Have interesting. Now I'm curious.
[43:59] So you mentioned it looks like a lot happened in two instinct.
[44:02] One, a lot happened in two it. Looks like you had the idea for
[44:05] Ladder at the time because you said you spoke to your parents
[44:06] about yes got to build ladder. Yes.
[44:10] And then from ladder, from the US, you you work with.
[44:13] Did you do Bamboo Fest before Mazuma?
[44:16] Or I worked in Mazuma first. Mazuma Bamboo, yes.
[44:19] OK. So when you are Mazuma, which is
[44:21] also like a Fintech, yes, you were thinking about ladder.
[44:24] No, I was not. But you had already conceived
[44:26] the idea for Ladder. No, I worked at Mazuma in 2020.
[44:30] Oh, OK, yeah. So you're still in school at the
[44:32] time? I was.
[44:33] OK, but what? What?
[44:34] What point did the idea for ladder?
[44:35] I really hate you. So it was somewhere in, I think
[44:40] it was April 2021, OK, where I was on a bunch of different just
[44:45] tech webinars. Clubhouse was really big.
[44:47] So I used to just jump into the clubhouse room.
[44:49] Read that face check at the Directory clubhouse.
[44:52] Yes. So I was just really exposed to
[44:58] it and I was looking at the different solutions that were on
[45:01] the market. And this idea started coming to
[45:03] me at the time actually I was thinking of it more so as a
[45:08] digital bank. And then when I did all of that,
[45:11] like surveys, interviews, I was trying to get closer to the
[45:15] heart of the problem, which isn't necessarily banking, but
[45:17] it's just how we experience personal finance.
[45:21] So I would say I really kneeled on what it was I wanted to do
[45:24] somewhere in June 2021. And then from there it was just
[45:28] trying to figure out what the initial product should look
[45:31] like. OK.
[45:32] And so now you're hearing, you're doing products, leading
[45:35] products, that's bamboo, probably a great place to be
[45:38] exposed to how a product is built.
[45:41] What moved the needle to move this idea in your head to
[45:45] something in the real world? So at the time I was already
[45:48] working on it, I was already, I already had my initial
[45:52] requirements, my initial scope of how I wanted to be, some
[45:55] level of prototyping. So in two parts, what validated
[46:00] that this is actually something I need to pursue and then what
[46:03] ultimately made me commit to doing it full time, What
[46:05] validated it was a problem that I saw which is that Africans
[46:10] were not buying stocks right like we would have.
[46:13] We did. We had an amazing business
[46:15] development team, amazing communications, amazing
[46:18] marketing, a lot of customer education.
[46:21] But the feedback that we kept getting was people just wanted,
[46:25] let's say something that they know this is going to give me
[46:26] 12% interest at the end of the year and let me go my way.
[46:29] I don't want to stay here and be picking stocks.
[46:31] Or maybe someone told me that Tesla is a good stock to buy or
[46:35] Facebook is a good stock to buy, so I'm just going to buy it and
[46:38] hold it. But they weren't doing that kind
[46:40] of recurring action that made sense on a commercial level.
[46:46] And so knocking a bit more on that door, you then start to see
[46:49] that the problem isn't necessarily access to
[46:52] investments, but it's the whole mindset and understanding around
[46:56] how to take advantage of these investments.
[46:59] And the problem isn't necessarily even just investing.
[47:01] It's the entire scope of finances in this market as we
[47:06] see it, right? A lot of people see fintech,
[47:08] especially consumer fintech, as a first world African problem,
[47:13] right? Where like you're just making
[47:14] these fancy apps for people that live in like continents or
[47:18] equity that are going to be able to actually participate in like
[47:22] using these platforms, which to some extent is true.
[47:26] Like there's some credence to that idea, but also personal
[47:30] finance is a universal problem. And so my take is that we are
[47:35] not actually addressing that universal underlying kink when
[47:41] it comes to what makes like a digital personal financial
[47:45] experience. We are more so just replicating
[47:48] the already inefficient ways that we do personal finance now,
[47:52] which is that you go to your bank here, you're banking with
[47:55] whichever bank, then you go to your assets manager here, good
[47:58] enough on you. If your bank has some kind of
[48:00] investment product, but then you're restricted to the
[48:03] investment product provided by your bank, then unless you have
[48:06] an accountant, you need to manage your expenses manually
[48:09] somewhere. Even at the time, one of my
[48:12] biggest frustrations was I don't know if I can call them out
[48:15] Fidelity Bank. Like I would be spending money
[48:17] on my Fidelity account and they would just be giving me a string
[48:21] of like characters. I didn't even know that, OK, I
[48:24] spent this money at the shell shop or I spent this money like
[48:27] at cupcake tea, like it was just random strings and I'm like,
[48:31] where is my data? Because I need to know where my
[48:34] money is going. So for me, it is again, this
[48:38] idea that technology is not just there to replicate what already
[48:41] exists, but it's really meant to be an enablizement to
[48:46] fundamentally improve a process. And with technology, you're able
[48:49] to abstract a lot of the things that make these things
[48:52] cumbersome in the 1st place. Financial institutions have
[48:55] given us a wonderful foundation to where we can aggregate their
[48:58] services and give the user a very smooth experience end to
[49:02] end, and actually then almost maybe even enjoy the process of
[49:07] taking care of their money because right now it's very
[49:10] cumbersome, it's very burdensome.
[49:12] Nobody even wants to do it. You made a statement about how
[49:18] when you're a bamboo, you realized that Africans don't buy
[49:20] stock. And that's true people.
[49:23] There's a setting, education the average Ghanaian has about how
[49:29] to move money in, how money works.
[49:31] If there was a mindset about money, you would want the people
[49:35] in the community or Africans to how what would they be?
[49:40] If there was a mindset I would want.
[49:42] Money. I would say like money is for
[49:48] you. I think that, yeah, lots of the
[49:52] time talking about money is a bit taboo or dealing with money
[49:57] is just so stressful that it's brings a lot of anxiety.
[50:01] But money is fundamentally a tool for you to be able to have
[50:06] certain outcomes, and it is for you to access, it's for you to
[50:11] cultivate, it's for you to manage, and it's for you to
[50:13] grow. It's there a lot of the time as
[50:16] well when you're coming from a place of scarcity or struggle.
[50:19] It's very hard to see it that way, and it seems like this
[50:23] thing that's forever out of reach.
[50:25] But something that I've learned over time has been that there's
[50:30] a certain level of access that you can empower yourself to have
[50:34] when it comes to money. And you don't need to make the
[50:37] most amount. You just need to make enough to
[50:39] get you to the next best step and to go from that and to go
[50:44] with that incrementally. So for example, going back to
[50:47] what I said earlier about a lot of people saying I just don't
[50:50] have enough money. I don't have enough money to
[50:52] save. I have enough money to invest.
[50:54] How do you know this? Are you tracking this?
[50:57] Do you have any visibility whatsoever?
[50:58] It's like, no, right. But if you are ending some kind
[51:02] of an income, at the very least, what is that enabling you to do?
[51:07] And what's the next stage that you need to be at because the
[51:10] money is there for you to be able to reach those outcomes.
[51:16] So that mindset shift needs to go from powerlessness to, I
[51:21] would say maybe just a little bit of hope even.
[51:23] Yeah. Interesting Text us Textiles.
[51:29] I envy you because on my hand was it?
[51:34] Was it in 2020? What year was this?
[51:38] 2022? My Co founders and I at a diary
[51:42] we applied to textiles New York. We met with KJ Singh, the
[51:47] programs manager, was great, had like 2 interviews who were going
[51:50] forward and then there was silence like 2 in the period for
[51:56] hearing back and well we got rejected and we went very far.
[52:02] Like oh God you were so close. And because Tech Stars is like
[52:06] after YC is Tech Stars, everybody wants to get to Tech
[52:09] Stars and put a certain premium on who you are as a founder.
[52:14] I mean outside the money, which is good.
[52:16] Is it $22,000 or 20? $1000 I think 120.
[52:20] Thousand $20,000 yeah, yeah. So now we had Lagos, Texas is
[52:25] coming to Nigeria. Yeah.
[52:26] I mean, if we got this far in New York, it would be easier for
[52:29] us to get. To Lagos.
[52:30] We met with those two women. They were managing the program
[52:34] at the time. Yeah, you look good.
[52:36] After the application we got, there's a next interview.
[52:39] You do. We got that going.
[52:40] You know, going back, get back to us.
[52:43] We got rejected again. And so you're in part, you're
[52:46] part of the first cohort. No, we actually did.
[52:49] Tech Stars Toronto. Toronto, OK, yeah.
[52:51] How did you get into tech Stars and how was your experience?
[52:59] Tech Stars was a fever dream, like the three months of Tech
[53:03] Stars, Probably like the hardest three months of my life or one
[53:06] of the hardest three months of my life.
[53:08] It was a very intense program in terms of how we got in.
[53:12] We actually had someone from the Tech Stars team reach out to us.
[53:16] And I think it was a fortunate mix of timing as well because
[53:20] there was the AI buzz was just very fresh and new and the
[53:25] fintech buzz was just dying down.
[53:27] And here we were like an applied AI fintech solution.
[53:30] So I think they were interested in having that sort of
[53:34] representation in their cohorts. So they reached out to us.
[53:37] We had a couple of interviews. This was even at the very end of
[53:40] when they were taking in people and I think we connected
[53:46] directly to the MD as well. Later on we found out that
[53:50] someone that had done Tech Stars before, I'd actually recommended
[53:52] us to the team because they thought that the solution was
[53:56] interesting. So yeah, I don't even remember.
[54:00] I can't see how we did it, but we sort of ended up there, which
[54:04] is funny because I remember having like a, he said back and
[54:06] forth with one of the interviewers in like 1 of the
[54:09] meetings. I was just sort of like, no,
[54:10] you're wrong. I can't even tell you why, like
[54:14] what the context was now, but I just was, I just thought to
[54:17] myself, well, we're not going to get it.
[54:18] And that's fine. Like I don't even care.
[54:20] But we end up guessing in and then the actual experience of
[54:23] it. So because it was a hybrid at
[54:25] the time, it was a lot of meetings and in text I was,
[54:29] there's this thing called mentor madness where it's like, I can't
[54:32] even remember. It's, it's several weeks of just
[54:34] like you're on calls for five hours with different like
[54:38] stakeholders, different founders, mentors, investors,
[54:44] people within your space, operators.
[54:46] And we would do like 5 hours of back-to-back holes, 5-6 hours
[54:50] back-to-back holes every single day.
[54:52] And it's like they are ripping into you at some point.
[54:55] You're just sort of like, why am I even this accelerator?
[54:58] Like if, if I'm so bad, like why am I even here?
[55:01] They're just ripping into you. And I've heard from some people
[55:04] that the textiles model is different from YC and the fact
[55:08] that they focus a lot on business development, whereas I
[55:12] guess YC focus is more on like investment readiness and
[55:16] fundraising. Textiles is like a lot of you
[55:21] need to define your weekly KPI's and every single week that
[55:25] metric has to be moving. You have to speak to the team on
[55:29] what are your big rocks for the week?
[55:30] What are your little rocks for the week?
[55:32] What are the key like 4 KPI's that you need to track?
[55:36] Did you hit this? What was expected?
[55:37] What did you actually guess? What was the variance?
[55:39] So like green, yellow, red. And then you need to explain in
[55:42] front of everybody why you did or did not hit the metric.
[55:45] Like it was very intense. And I think, you know, going
[55:49] back to what I said earlier about focusing on business
[55:52] development and distribution, textiles is one of the things
[55:55] that really gave me a big kick up the bum in terms of you need
[55:58] to stop thinking about this product completely and you need
[56:01] to start actually thinking about how you're getting your first
[56:03] however many customers. So I think when we're going to
[56:06] Textiles, I don't remember it was like 1000 or 3000 customers
[56:11] that we had in the time of being in Tech Stars, we tripled our
[56:13] customer base and then the months following Tech Stars, we
[56:17] then like quadrupled it. So the things that we learned
[56:20] from there were really helpful for the business.
[56:23] I do think though, that in terms of fundraising, it was a bit
[56:26] hard because that was during the funding just slow down and then
[56:32] there was a general drought. And then like you were also an
[56:36] African company. So that just made it like next
[56:40] to impossible to raise in a way that I think YC even at the
[56:44] time, they kind of like people that once you do YC like you're
[56:47] just raising like almost guaranteed.
[56:50] But Tech Stars wasn't like that because they really focus on a
[56:52] lot of the fundamentals of business development and growth,
[56:56] which was which was also helpful.
[56:59] But I don't think I would do another accelerator again.
[57:02] Tell me, say yeah, yeah, we're too old for that now at this
[57:04] point. Yeah, I'm, I'm, it was a lot.
[57:07] It was a lot. Let's let's talk about customers
[57:10] from I remember so after text as you had how many customers you
[57:14] have at the time. I think it was about 3000.
[57:17] How many customers do you have now Download.
[57:19] Right now downloads probably about 25,000 or something of
[57:23] this sort. Yeah, and.
[57:24] Then you have a team less than 20 people.
[57:26] Yes, we do. How do you manage the team?
[57:29] How do I manage? Yeah.
[57:30] How do you manage your team to be able to attend to 20,000
[57:33] customers? A team of less than 20 people to
[57:36] manage 20,000 customers? How do you keep them going?
[57:40] How do I keep the team going? I think we have a very
[57:43] interesting culture at Ladder of Agency and I really believe in
[57:48] this high trust, high agency. So everybody that's on the team,
[57:51] you have a certain level of trust that you're going to be
[57:54] able to own what you own end to end.
[57:56] And not to mean that you will figure every single thing out,
[58:00] but more so that you exhaust every resource needed, even if
[58:03] that resource is me, myself. Like there's times where Grace
[58:06] can literally come and just stand on my neck and she comes
[58:08] to me like 5 times. I'll be hiding from here, like
[58:10] go away, but she'll come to me and I have to attend to here to
[58:14] support her to get something done.
[58:16] So every single person, even the interns, like interns come with,
[58:19] come to work with us. And you would even be surprised
[58:23] that this person is an intern because they have a certain
[58:26] level of ownership over whatever it is that's within their scope.
[58:30] And so I think that has empowered our team to also
[58:33] advocate for themselves in terms of whatever resources they need,
[58:36] whether it's an additional person or it's a tool, they're
[58:40] able to have access to those things to be able to do the work
[58:45] that they need to do. And I think also we've been
[58:47] blessed with, we've been blessed with talented people.
[58:52] I think someone I've read somewhere that when you're
[58:55] solving a really important problem, people that are very
[59:00] talented would flock to it. So we've been blessed to be able
[59:03] to attract talents that is just great and solid.
[59:07] And I think between my senior management team and myself,
[59:10] we're also able to identify people that would be high
[59:14] performance. So that also helps, yeah.
[59:18] It's I want to, you mentioned something I wanted to come back
[59:22] to that. Remember when you say where you
[59:25] were when the answer to your prayer, the call from the friend
[59:29] 45 minutes after you parade talking about, you know, the
[59:32] regulatory framework with Intex in that space, How have you
[59:36] navigated the regulator 'cause you guys, people invest through
[59:38] your platform, right? People give you money.
[59:43] You don't give us money, they give our partners.
[59:45] Money. So you explain that for us,
[59:47] yeah. So people invest in your
[59:50] business, sorry on the platform, on the platform you're basically
[59:53] taking money off. So like a really like a conduit
[59:55] for receiving investments or how the regulates your regulatory
[1:00:00] framework looking like on that front.
[1:00:03] You know, how's that looking like?
[1:00:04] It's interesting, I think that's the best word I could use to
[1:00:08] describe it. I think at the time the person
[1:00:10] probably slightly oversold it, but there's been a lot of
[1:00:14] headway in the space now. I mean, where 5 to 10 years ago
[1:00:18] fintech is like, what's that? At least there's an office of
[1:00:21] fintech now. The regulator is paying
[1:00:24] attention to innovations like ours.
[1:00:27] It has been tough though, because in Ghana fintech
[1:00:29] regulation is often just payments regulation.
[1:00:33] So it's payment system providers.
[1:00:35] You think of something like a MasterCard or Flutter Weaver pay
[1:00:38] stack, and that's the kind of license category that they want
[1:00:41] to put everybody under. Now there's sandboxes that are
[1:00:45] meant to address that. So if you have an innovative
[1:00:47] solution that doesn't fall underneath any of these, then
[1:00:51] you can go under that. So we've had our fair share of
[1:00:54] like you know battles with the regulator, especially when the
[1:00:58] marketing team gets a bit overexcited, we go and do
[1:01:00] something and the blows up even more than we expect.
[1:01:03] The regulators are just going to come knocking at your door.
[1:01:06] So we had a few challenges earlier this year with that and
[1:01:09] we had to really take a pause and look at the infrastructure
[1:01:12] and how we were running it. So because of that we even even
[1:01:16] had to transition some of our partners to be more local based
[1:01:19] partners, but still partners that can give people access to
[1:01:22] the types of asset classes that our customers want.
[1:01:25] Yeah. I think now we are in a better
[1:01:29] position with the regulators and I think we've been doing a lot
[1:01:32] of communication over the last like couple of years with them.
[1:01:36] Yeah. But it hasn't been, it hasn't
[1:01:39] been a smooth ride. But I also think these things
[1:01:41] that's always like the sacrificial alarm, like there's
[1:01:43] always that person that has just go and just take.
[1:01:46] And beyond the altar. Yeah.
[1:01:48] You just have to go and do it so that it also opens the door for
[1:01:51] other people to come in. And we're happy to be at least
[1:01:55] one of the first people to go through that because I think
[1:01:58] Ladder in itself is one of the very few fintechs that's not
[1:02:02] necessarily attached to an existing financial institution,
[1:02:06] but it's really new and innovative in that sense.
[1:02:10] Yeah, OK. Interesting.
[1:02:13] All right, So what does the future look like for Ladder?
[1:02:16] If you're to in your mind's eye, if you're to work same time
[1:02:21] 2027, you know, where do you envision ladder?
[1:02:24] What do you hope it will be? Team France, Customer France
[1:02:29] Product France You know those 3 strands?
[1:02:32] How do they? What does that look like?
[1:02:34] Team France, I think our team size is probably going to expand
[1:02:38] just a little bit, probably just like 1/3 of a third more of what
[1:02:41] we have right now. Customer firm, we're on our
[1:02:44] route to 1,000,000 users. That's really the big number for
[1:02:48] us. This year.
[1:02:49] We're looking at doing a pilot in Nigeria, a lot more of a
[1:02:53] stable regulatory environment. And also I think Nigeria is an
[1:02:57] interesting market because they already have a saturation of
[1:03:00] fintech. And so this idea of aggregation
[1:03:04] being a better option for your experience will really be put to
[1:03:08] the test, which I'm excited about.
[1:03:11] So we're doing that and then hopefully by 2027, we can at
[1:03:15] least pilots in one more market. But the big goal is, yeah, being
[1:03:19] on our route to our first million users.
[1:03:21] And then what was the team front, customer, product front?
[1:03:24] Oh yes, on a product level, key thing is to prove the baseline
[1:03:31] product thesis, which is aggregating multiple savings,
[1:03:34] investment products, budget management products.
[1:03:36] And then one thing I'm really excited about for the next year
[1:03:40] or so is digital banking and transaction services.
[1:03:43] So actually having people be able to spend money through
[1:03:46] ladder because that also helps us get better data to really
[1:03:51] support our customers. So that's a big like thing on
[1:03:54] our road map that I can't wait to see manifest as well as
[1:03:58] scaling Lady AI to be. So right now Lady AI is a base,
[1:04:03] is a prompt based model. So you say something, it says
[1:04:05] something back and then there's some level of smart
[1:04:08] notifications and athletes. Right now we want Lady AI to be
[1:04:11] like a constant monitor, so proactive and reactive.
[1:04:15] And that's the next stage where it's like you don't necessarily
[1:04:18] need to say something to lady, but lady is looking through your
[1:04:21] data and is saying things to you to prompt you as to decisions
[1:04:25] you need to be making or things that you need to be aware of.
[1:04:28] So skating lady AI is really important for us for that from,
[1:04:32] for the next, I would say 12 to 18 months.
[1:04:35] And then since we're talking about 20271, key thing as well
[1:04:39] that we'll be experimenting with is actually solutions for small
[1:04:42] businesses. It's something that I really
[1:04:44] care about because a lot of people within our user base are
[1:04:47] also people that are entrepreneurial.
[1:04:49] They want to start businesses or they have side hustles.
[1:04:52] So we're looking at what does that financial management
[1:04:55] toolkits look like or an intelligence financial
[1:04:58] management toolkit look like to support somebody that's managing
[1:05:01] a business on the side. And that's something I'm
[1:05:03] interested in. We've also gotten a lot of
[1:05:07] interest from the financial institutions that we partner
[1:05:09] with on what our AI looks like for them.
[1:05:13] So that's something that we're also looking at is building a
[1:05:16] software as a service based on lady AI that other financial
[1:05:20] institutions can integrate into their own apps.
[1:05:22] So imagine if some of the apps that you're using on a regular
[1:05:25] basis have a very smart AI that could actually support you to
[1:05:30] have better financial outcomes. Interesting.
[1:05:33] It's good. You mentioned Lady and the banks
[1:05:37] I had your. If I shut up with lady, it's
[1:05:39] like a, it's thinking like multi APIs multi, you know like.
[1:05:45] I really need to know who's feeding you this information.
[1:05:48] Like your research is so deep for multi agents.
[1:05:52] Agents like a navigation of multi agents.
[1:05:54] So as in what, what whichever one's high point is, you know, a
[1:05:57] kick say, yeah, that's, that's brilliant.
[1:05:59] But the question with the banks is do you think you're going to
[1:06:01] be coming? Because I I've heard you
[1:06:02] mentioned somewhere or tweeted somewhere about a new bank.
[1:06:05] Do you think you're you're trying to build a bank like
[1:06:08] revolutes? You going to be like a new bank
[1:06:11] is what you're trying to. Do I do think that as scale
[1:06:13] ladder looks like her revolutes, I sometimes I resist the term
[1:06:17] bank. I don't know what it is, but I
[1:06:19] think that in practice, yes. Like our goal is to make this
[1:06:23] the smartest bank you've ever used and hopefully the only one
[1:06:26] you ever need. Great, great.
[1:06:31] Well, since you asked though about what's next as well for
[1:06:34] ladder in the immediate term, we are running a campaign now
[1:06:38] called the Track Every City campaign.
[1:06:41] Last year, we built out the spending feature, which helps
[1:06:43] people track all the money that they're spending.
[1:06:46] We actually have a feature that's in beta that allows you
[1:06:50] to link your bank accounts and track how much money is going in
[1:06:53] and out. I think it's bank accounted in
[1:06:55] one mobile money, I think it's SLT Go.
[1:06:57] So the Track Every City campaign is just encouraging our users to
[1:07:01] track all the money they spend, whether automatically or
[1:07:04] manually. And it's around this thing we
[1:07:07] said earlier on about a mindset shift and helping people
[1:07:11] actually be aware of their financial data and make better
[1:07:13] decisions based on it. So that's something we've been
[1:07:15] running through October and we'll be running into November.
[1:07:20] Exciting. Yeah, I see.
[1:07:23] I want to ask a question. It's like, OK, away from ladder
[1:07:26] a little to use the best thing. What do you do when you're not
[1:07:29] making good you love, which I'm yet to taste?
[1:07:31] And being an interior decorator in your home, what do you do?
[1:07:34] What do I do? I love music, like I'm a huge
[1:07:41] music fan. Your brother must be top of your
[1:07:43] Spotify list. Sorry your brother, you must be
[1:07:46] on top of your Spotify. He's not, That's all.
[1:07:48] If you're watching, your sister doesn't like your music.
[1:07:50] I like his music. It's just, I mean, no.
[1:07:54] But yeah, I'm a huge music fan, always looking for like new
[1:07:57] things to listen to. There's so many like new
[1:07:59] projects that I have queued up that I just need to have time to
[1:08:02] listen to. But I'm a big fan of music.
[1:08:04] I used to write a lot. I don't write as much anymore.
[1:08:10] And yeah, what I think that's pretty much it.
[1:08:12] It's listening to music, reading.
[1:08:14] I'm really like I've been reading since I was 3 so.
[1:08:18] Yeah, big reader, you still read history.
[1:08:20] No, not as much. I'm really.
[1:08:22] I love fiction. I love fiction a lot.
[1:08:25] And then lately I've been reading all these more boring
[1:08:27] books about banking and industry.
[1:08:30] Yes. Book accommodations for fiction.
[1:08:33] For fiction, I'm the Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King.
[1:08:36] It's such a great book. One of my favorites.
[1:08:39] One of my favorite books of all time is called The Book Thief as
[1:08:42] well by Marcus Zusak. It's an incredible, like
[1:08:45] incredible writing have. You tried the Brothers
[1:08:47] Karamazov? I have not.
[1:08:49] My Fyodor Dostoevsky, you should try it.
[1:08:51] Dostoevsky, I read him in college.
[1:08:52] It was painful. Oh, why we read What Crime and
[1:08:56] Punishment? It was, it was Russian
[1:08:58] literature is very sad. It's very existential.
[1:09:02] Yeah, it's like a blend of like philosophy and theology.
[1:09:05] And psychology. I have this theory that after
[1:09:09] you read Dostoevsky, every other form of literature has sort of
[1:09:12] pales, like doesn't feel so intense.
[1:09:14] Yes, yes, yes. Yes, yeah, I believe in like, So
[1:09:18] even with like everything I could see, music, movies, media.
[1:09:21] I believe in happy things. Like the world is too sad.
[1:09:25] So when I'm free, I don't want to be sad.
[1:09:28] Who watched The Office multiple times?
[1:09:29] No, I don't watch the. Office.
[1:09:32] Abbott Elementary is good though.
[1:09:34] Abbott Elementary I've. Not seen that.
[1:09:35] Oh, it's hilarious. It's a riot.
[1:09:37] You should. I'm jealous of you, actually,
[1:09:38] because we have like three seasons to watch.
[1:09:40] Yeah, you should watch it. I'll give.
[1:09:42] You, I'll give you some, I'm short, but thank you for what
[1:09:44] you're building. I'm excited about what you're
[1:09:46] doing with and I'm more so with like the underlying machine that
[1:09:49] you're trying to empower our people economically.
[1:09:53] Keep doing it, and more so with women because on the podcast you
[1:09:57] look at our catalog. Yeah.
[1:09:59] Yeah, just a few women, women represented on the and it's not
[1:10:02] because, not because no lack of Air Force, not because you're
[1:10:05] not reaching out to the women, you're actually reaching out to
[1:10:06] women. But you know, there are not lots
[1:10:10] of them out there, just a few. And so it's encouraging to know
[1:10:15] women who are like in entrepreneurial speech and
[1:10:17] moving the needle here and then and pushing the frontier.
[1:10:21] So I hope there's an encouraging to women out there.
[1:10:23] And if you have a word for like the girls you say about starting
[1:10:26] out? Oh, thank you very much for your
[1:10:29] kind words and thank you for having me.
[1:10:32] I think I may have some women that I can recommend off air for
[1:10:35] you to reach out to that I'm building really amazing things.
[1:10:40] Shout out to Valerie from I can't remember the name, they do
[1:10:45] evikes really impressive company.
[1:10:48] And then Misha as well from Just Just Dream Africa.
[1:10:52] But yeah, I'll give you a couple of regs.
[1:10:54] But I do want to see more women on your podcast though.
[1:10:58] You would do that They have yet. But yeah, I don't really have
[1:11:03] anything to say to young girls out there.
[1:11:05] I mean, I think just pest on yourself, just do things, yeah.
[1:11:11] Just just do things. You can just get up and do
[1:11:14] anything you want, actually. Yeah, yeah.
[1:11:16] Because I think I'm also in a phase where I was telling my
[1:11:18] friends that in a phase where just get up and do things.
[1:11:22] Yeah. Because there's a yeah, thank
[1:11:25] you. I forgot that on this interview
[1:11:27] with I've forgotten discussing, you kept mentioning, you know,
[1:11:30] you kept mentioning you don't mention God.
[1:11:32] You mentioned the divine and the divine.
[1:11:34] You don't you never see God. And if you realise that?
[1:11:36] Really. Yeah.
[1:11:37] Me, yes, you Oh, interesting. So I was wondering is she's got
[1:11:41] a Christian or she's like spiritual?
[1:11:43] I am Christian. A Christian OK until I saw
[1:11:46] Matthew 517 on your bio OK so I'm friends in the craft the
[1:11:51] world beyond just built something so you do a.

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