The co-founders of Truecaller-Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam- have announced that the world’s largest caller-identification system will launch ‘Truecaller Pay‘ in Nigeria in the first half of 2020 as it readies for a possible IPO.
The launch if and when it happens will signal Truecaller’s pivot into Nigeria’s already competitive fintech space. The co-founders plan to launch Truecaller Pay in other African markets. However, there is no timeline yet for this expansion.
Truecaller is already trialing financial service products ahead of a possible stock-exchange listing.
This year, the Swedish company started a pilot program to provide credit to small business owners in India and will begin offering the service to some of its 140 million users in the country early next year.
About 20 million of its users are small businesses, and the company will extend credit to them by way of financial partners. The move should bolster the preparedness of the company, formally known us True Software Scandinavia AB, for an initial public offering by 2022, the CEO of Truecaller Alan Mamedi said in an interview with Bloomberg.
“In three years, revenue from subscriptions, advertising and fintech will be equal in size for Truecaller,” the CEO said. “In a market where very few are banked and digitalized, there’s a large potential.”
Truecaller is following a similar path to Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat, which built its dominance in messaging before adding features including dating services, gaming, and payments. Truecaller was initially aimed at providing information about incoming telephone calls, but has added messaging and call functionality, and in 2017 started offering mobile payments in India.
The company has also started offering businesses the option of setting up profile pages with details about their offerings, opening hours and other information.
“There’s a lack of a trusted directory for businesses in India, as well as in many other emerging markets,” Mamedi said. “Before we enabled business profiles, people were very creative, using Photoshop to add images from stores to profile pictures and adding quotes from customers.”
Truecaller is a smartphone application that has features of caller-identification, call-blocking, flash-messaging, call-recording, Chat & Voice which uses the internet.
