NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

The Global Innovation Fund announced its first round of investments on Tuesday, the first of which went to Segovia, a software technology platform to streamline payment systems.

Michael Faye and Paul Niehaus, the co-founders of Segovia, launched the company in 2014 in response to some of the challenges they experienced in scaling their other venture,GiveDirectly, a nonprofit organization making cash transfers via mobile phones.

“To realize the gains of increased financial connectivity, we need to dramatically reduce the complexity of bulk payment for NGOs, governments and corporates,” Faye told Devex. “Segovia is a streamlined enterprise platform to pay people securely, efficiently and rapidly in the emerging markets.”

Named after one of the largest aqueducts in the Roman Empire, Segovia is modeled to do for cash distribution what these feats of engineering did for water distribution.