A Female Fintech Founder, An ‘Ezee’ Solution: Narda Ventura and Ezeepayments.com

Narda Ventura suffered a disappointing setback that curtailed the launch of her digital school fee payments solution in Jamaica. But that turned into the perfect opportunity to serve a wider spectrum of micro to medium sized businesses. This larger opportunity has resulted in Sky Blue Transactions Solutions Inc. and the successful launch of its first product subsidiary ezeepayments.com.

The Pivot

Narda herself runs the swim school Aquaworx and made every attempt to make that business cashless, but bank-to-bank transfers for payments of fees proved time consuming when it came to reconciling who had paid for what. Likewise, as a parent she desperately wanted to find a simpler, non-manual way to pay her children’s school fees. That’s where the original idea for schoolfeepayments.com was born.

But on the cusp of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020; parents and schools formerly interested in a speedier way to transact school fee payments became far more concerned with getting e-learning off the ground quickly.

Narda and co-founder Kyle Lewis had spent three years developing the bootstrapped platform but for all its benefits it had come at the wrong time and according to her,

“… we decided, alright, we just spent all this money on developing the solution… Wouldn’t it be great if we could just package this in a way that a micro to medium sized business could get a solution in a box that would remove all the heavy lifting with the commercial banks so they become ecommerce capable; and remove the high technical expertise required because it’s really just plug and play? …God knows cash is king for them. Spending money on development of an ecommerce portal is not a priority even though accepting online payments is. So, we pivoted…”

The idea made sense, after all according to the Jamaica Information Service over 97% of the country’s tax paying businesses are micro, small or medium sized.

Audacity and experience paved the way for ezeepayments.com

But what female swim school owner in the Caribbean decides to become a Fintech founder? Narda gives some insight,

“When you look at panels of Fintech founders, they’re men. Thank God they’re Caribbean men of colour. And then here comes this woman of colour in the Fintech arena. Why? I definitely consider myself to be somebody that’s not just driven. You could almost call me audacious.”

Audacity aside, she also has 15 years of experience in the financial industry having worked in human resources and card acquiring at National Commercial Bank (NCB) and in product development at Jamaica Money Market Brokers (JMMB) before reverting to her first love, swimming.

In fact, during her time at NCB she had worked with Lewis on many projects and he was the first person she called to ask for advice on creating a payment solution. It was also there that she became very familiar with how card transactions worked, as ecommerce and online banking were coming on stream.

How is ezeepayments.com different?

Ventura notes that,

“…we have a unique relationship with our banking partners in that we fit into this box called payment facilitators. We weren’t just that typical ecommerce merchant, the fact that we now have the ability to accept money from customers on behalf of the business or the school… and pass that money to our systems and to them put us in [that] category.”

Merchants can use the ezeepayments.com platform with or without a website as a payment page is created for them. Their customers are directed to that payment page from their website checkout page or a “pay now” button in a digital invoice or simple online message from email or social media. Narda likens the process to a purchase experience on amazon.com alluding to the familiarity and ease.

As a former student of psychology, she appreciates a critical factor in developing products, as she maintains,

“…this is where psychology comes in; understanding how people operate, what their typical behaviours are…A real solution is something that fits hand in glove not creates this whole new way of behaving… you can’t start with behavioural change, you have to meet them where they are now, and slowly convert them with your solution to get them to where you are.”

While she and her co-founder expected to onboard businesses who were new to ecommerce or weren’t yet accepting payments online, they were surprised that some existing ecommerce merchants were leaving their old providers to switch to ezeepayments.com. Narda explains that,

“Typically, in the banking sector, and we are a FinTech so we fall into the banking sector, Jamaicans in particular don’t switch. They will create an additional relationship with another bank and have a primary and a secondary relationship rather than switching completely. But for merchants to come onto our platform and completely switch, as in ‘I am not using Product A anymore I am now using product B’, that was a surprise…a real compliment for us.”

She puts down the unexpected behaviour to the new platform’s quick 24–48-hour onboarding process, predictable settlements every Tuesday and Friday and, especially to a fixed transaction fee rather than a fee that fluctuates based on the transaction amount.

The result? Success.

A few hundred merchants have already signed on to ezeepayments.com since the launch in early 2022. The product is also proving attractive to web developers creating ecommerce sites for their clients who can quickly close out their projects with a ready solution. In addition, the product can also be white labelled and branded by other companies to serve their needs.

Narda also explains that schoolfeepayments.com is still viable and other niches can be developed based on the ezeepayments.com model creating additional subsidiaries of Sky Blue Transactions Solutions.

Great things are to come, she almost warns.