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WaystoCap, is a Casablanca-based platform dedicated to facilitating B2B operations through a digital platform specialized in international trade. It is a way of helping African traders and businesses purchase and sell products via the Internet. Founded by Niama El Bassunie, a London School of Economics and Political Science graduate who worked as a Senior associate for PWC, WaystoCap was launched in 2015 in Casablanca with the help of two other bankers, namely Mehdi Daoui (Chief Operations Officer) and Anis Abdeddine (Chief Sales Officer). The founding team was later joined by Aziz Jaouhari Tissafi who now works as a Chief Technical Officer.
The platform’s main objective according to CEO El Bassunie is to put forward an «ecosystem offering services such as insurance to suppliers, financing to buyers and logistics management to remove inefficiencies» alongside selling and buying. Speaking to Entrepreneur Middle East, she admitted that after working for years in international trade and getting familiar with the African market in particular, she opted for the launching of her own digital market. Working in projects that engaged sourcing products to Egypt, Turkey, Spain and South Africa, the young entrepreneur got «excited about the possibilities offered to a young first-time entrepreneur, trying to help buyers and sellers across Europe and Africa».
Today, the WaystoCap team led by El Bassunie is determined to «creating a digital marketplace that would address all the challenges we had been facing, and enable businesses in Africa to trade faster, cheaper, and securely», the same source added. With the help of Nic Pantucci, Head of Platform & Growth, the team was able to kickstart its first operations facilitating «trade in Africa» and making use of technology to «the opaque nature of the financing, insurance, and payments of trade».
A platform for African traders
To put it in other words, WaytoCap provides a large network of buyers and sellers who sign up to the platform to purchase goods or trade them internationally with an «average order size of of US$30,000». The team then backed by strategic partners makes sure that the operation is safe and then «monetize by charging a commission on a successful trade», states the online newspaper.
Niama El Bassunie indicated that their company is mostly targeting small commodities such as agricultural products which are in demand when it comes to the African market. She also insisted that WaystoCap is there to «make the deal happen» doing what international traders mostly fear the most namely «verifing suppliers and buyers to facilitate financing partners and secure payments».
Aside from being one of the first platforms to focus on international trade in Morocco in such an updated way, WaystoCap is the first Moroccan «that graduated from the US-based accelerator program, Y combinatory». Now El Bassunie believes that the team is on the right path as the rise of startups in Morocco is seeing these days a significant improvement. She told the same source that «the probability of success in a startup is, by default, very low, so we need to provide all the tools to increase that probability of success».
