Money Should Feel Like a Text Message

When we started InversePay, we had one stubborn idea in our heads: money should move the way a message moves.

You type a text. You hit send. It’s there. No friction. No wondering if it arrived. No fees stacked on fees. No waiting three days for something that should take three seconds. That’s how messages work. That’s how money should work, too.

That’s the dream that put us in a room together, to build a way for money to move freely, easily, and fast between people. Across cities. Across borders. Across Africa, and beyond.

What we saw

We grew up in a part of the world where moving money is unreasonably hard.

Sending €100 from Paris to a cousin in Kigali could cost €15 in fees and take three days. Paying a supplier across a border meant phone calls, branch visits, and exchange rates nobody could explain. Even sending money to the next district, in your own country, came with stress, did it land? Should I call them? Did the network drop?

We knew this wasn’t really a technology problem. The internet had already solved the problem of “moving information instantly.” Photos, voice notes, memes — those move faster than thought. But money? Money was still stuck somewhere in the 1990s, bouncing between intermediaries, each one taking a slice and adding a delay.

So we decided to build something different. A system where sending money to your mother, your supplier, your friend across the continent feels exactly like sending a text. Tap. Send. Done.

The first version

We launched InversePay v1 with a clear bet: build something real, get it in front of people, and let them tell us what’s broken.

And they did.

Users told us where the wallet felt slow. They told us that signing up took too long. They showed us the moments where the app stopped feeling like magic and started feeling like work. Some of that feedback was hard to hear. Most of it was generous. All of it was useful.

We watched people try to send money home and hit a wall they shouldn’t have hit. We watched small business owners try to collect from a customer abroad and give up halfway. We watched small frictions add up into big reasons people stopped trusting the system.

So we went back to the drawing board.

What we learned

The thing about building for real people is that you can’t ship your assumptions. You have to ship something, watch what actually happens, and be honest about the gap.

The best money experiences are the ones you don’t notice — the ones where you don’t have to think about the rails, the partners, the steps in between. You just want to send. You just want to receive. You just want it to be done.

Introducing InversePay v2

Today, we’re taking the lessons from last year and turning them into something new.

InversePay v2 is a faster, easier, nicer way to move money. It’s built on everything our users told us they needed and stripped of everything they told us they didn’t.

It’s a wallet that feels light. A send flow that feels obvious. A way to move money across borders that doesn’t feel like crossing a border at all.

We’re not adding more buttons. We’re removing the ones that didn’t earn their place. We’re not asking anyone to learn a new system. We’re building one that meets you where you already are on your phone, in your language, on the network you already use.

Money should feel like a text message. That’s the standard we’re holding ourselves to. If sending money to your sister in Lagos doesn’t feel as easy as sending her a voice note, we haven’t done our job yet.

The future we’re building for

A future where a mother in Kigali can pay her son’s school fees in Kampala without thinking twice. Where a freelancer in Nairobi can get paid by a client in Berlin and not lose a week to it. Where small businesses across the continent can transact with each other the way they should have been able to all along, instantly, affordably, with dignity.

A future where money is not a wall between people. It’s a bridge.

That’s why we started. That’s why we’re still here. And v2 is the next step toward a world where money finally moves the way it should at the speed of trust, at the speed of need, at the speed of a text message.

To everyone who’s been on this journey with us, the users, the partners, the agents, and the team, thank you. The first version was the proof. The next one is the promise.

Let’s keep building.

— The InversePay Team