COVER STORY
spending a lot of money on making
calls back home. That was around
the time when he was organising his
wedding.
Put simply, his company was a mobile application that reduced the cost
of calling abroad from ¢30 (about
Rwf250) to ¢19 (about Rwf100) per
minute.
THE BIRTH OF PESA CHOICE
Nteziryayo’s innovation eventually
earned him the nickname Mr KivuTel, and, most importantly, gave birth
to his now successful tech company,
Pesa Choice.
“Through interactions with my KivuTel clients, they would tell me stories
of how sending money back home
was a problem and how they would
get swindled through middlemen
who were usually family members,”
he says. “This gave me the idea of
developing an app that would help
Africans in the diaspora send money safely back home and also pay for
utilities for their loved ones.”
HIS FIRST JOBS
Even though Nteziryayo had graduated from a prestigious university,
finding a white collar job in the US
soon after completing university
proved futile. So, he had to pull back
from trying to control his destiny
and go back to accepting whatever
fate had in store for him.
“At first I used to loathe odd jobs,
but America teaches you that every
job is a job as long as it can help you
put food on the table,” Nteziryayo
muses on his humble beginnings in
America’s job market.
In the beginning, Nteziryayo settled for odd jobs, first working as
a trash truck driver and then as a
dish cleaner at a restaurant. He also
earned a living packing drugs in
small containers at a pharmaceutical company.
Then, after years of sweating it out in
14 - CHIEF EXECUTIVE
odd jobs, Nteziryayo finally ‘struck
gold’ at DISH Network, a Fortune
500 company where he worked for
seven years, first as a quality analyst
and later as a systems administrator.
From DISH Network he landed another juicy job at ACI Worldwide, a
company that he helped develop a
software called Postilion, which is
now used by various banks around
East Africa in their ATM machines.
Nteziryayo stayed with ACI Worldwide until 2014 when he was told to
get lost.
However, the young geek never
spent a lot of time lamenting the
loss of his job at ACI Worldwide as
he had already prepared himself for
the ‘real world’.
During his time at ACI Worldwide,
he had founded his own tech company called KivuTel, which he created after he had realised that he was
But much as the idea seemed great,
Nteziryayo knew very well that sustaining a company is not as easy as
starting one. So, in order to realise
his dream, he had to team up with
two of his old friends, Pacifique Mahoro and Odilon Senyana. The latter
was Nteziryayo’s classmate at university.
“Running a company is not as easy
as developing an app... That is why
I needed a strong team to make this
dream come true,” he says.
Investing an initial amount of about
$40,000, Pesa Choice caught on like
a wild fire from the word go.
“The idea of the app gained wings
with my friends and family. Our
advantage is that when you compare Pesa Choice with other money
transfer services, you realise that we
charge so little yet our service is instant,” says Nteziryayo.
The past seven months since Nteziryayo and his partners launched
the company have seen growth
nothing short of phenomenal. Yes,
over 2,000 subscribers from operations in the United States, Uganda,
Rwanda, Nigeria, the UK and Kenya.