When a diverted tuition payment cost a family member their university place, Jones Amegbor realised sending money home was only half the problem. Determined to eliminate the middleman, he set out to build a system that pays schools, hospitals, and insurers directly. A decade later, that system, PayAngel, has processed over $450 million by guaranteeing where remittance money actually lands. OPEYEMI KAREEM reports
Jones Amegbor learned the hard way that, in matters of cross-border remittances, a successful transfer does not always mean a successful outcome.
In 2010, he sat at his desk in the bank where he worked, watching the clock as the deadline for a family member’s university tuition drew closer. He could not get away from the office in time to reach an agent location, so he sent the payment later than he should have and braced himself for what that would mean. The family member was expelled anyway.
For months, Amegbor carried the guilt of that lateness until he discovered the truth: the payment delay was not the cause of the expulsion. The tuition he had sent the previous semester had not reached the university at all. Instead, a family member had diverted it, promising to make things right later.
“Why can’t we send the money directly?” Amegbor recalled asking himself. He noted that he started digging and realised how many people in the diaspora had their version of the same story of money being diverted to where it was not supposed to.
That question, he told TechCabal in a June interview, is what set him on the path to building PayAngel, a cross-border payments company that serves Africans in the diaspora to send money with a guarantee of where it lands.
In 2023, Africa received $100 billion in remittances, equivalent to nearly 6% of the continent’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). While the remittance industry has attracted founders focused on making transfers faster and cheaper, Amegbor noted that what happens after the money arrives has received less attention. He founded PayAngel in 2013 around that premise.