Exclusive: How Smartwage is Breaking the Payday Poverty Cycle

Smartwage partners with businesses to provide workers with instant access to their earned salaries and wages.

Co-founded in 2019 by Simon Ellis, Alex Platt and Nick Platt. The startup enables companies to provide instant access to a percentage of their salaries and wages to their employees for work they have already done.

The solution is free for employees, it does not interfere with existing processes, it preserves the cash flow of businesses and reduces administrative hassle. Employees can contact SmartWage’s WhatsApp chatbot directly to securely request and receive advances on their earned pay.

Business Elites Africa had a chat with the CEO, Simon Ellis, who believes SmartWage is the solution to the huge problem of salary advance that employees have battled for years.

Q: What does SmartWage do?

A: SmartWage gives employees access to their salaries and wages as they have earned them. We partner with employers, giving them the ability to offer advances to their employees in an affordable and accessible way. We’re here to empower employees and on a mission to eradicate payday loans and help educate people about managing their money.

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Q: What path led to where SmartWage is right now?

A: The idea of SmartWage manifested itself in September 2019, when we started to realise that the way people were getting paid was changing. Why is it that, as an employee, you should wait until the end of the month to get paid? At the same time, why was it so difficult as an employer to give your employees access to what they have already earned. We set out to solve this problem and officially launched SmartWage in February 2020. After a few months of piloting the idea and refining our value proposition, we began building a team who could solve the problem and then raised some capital in June 2020 to allow us to begin execution.