GreenHouse Capital’s Investment in NowMoney

Accounting for over 50% of the GCC region’s population, many migrant workers relocate from countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India in the search for better work opportunities and ultimately earn higher wages to support their families. Most of these migrant workers remit over 75% of their income back home through traditional means of remittance such as agencies. The financial system across the Middle East underserves this critical population with many migrant workers unable to access bank accounts and other financial services such as digital funds transfers, credit, or savings products. This disconnect creates a massive opportunity to deliver banking services specifically for the unbanked population in the Gulf region.

Dubai-based fintech NowMoney is addressing this gap by providing a platform that gives users a free account with no minimum balance, a Visa debit card, an easy-to-use app, and a transfer system to send money home. Its niche of serving migrant financial flows is a backdoor into some of the fastest-growing, but also operationally challenging, emerging markets including Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and many African markets. Taken together, these represent a nearly four billion-person market — the largest on Earth.

Driven by two visionary founders, Katharine Budd and Ian Dillon, NowMoney taps this neglected mass market by providing vital low-cost financial services to migrant workers in the Gulf. The duo has surmounted several barriers to advance their mission of “giving accounts to people banks don’t” while helping to build and grow the rapidly evolving UAE tech ecosystem.

We at GreenHouse Capital (GHC) are proud to announce our investment in NowMoney’s Series A round and are delighted to be working closely with Ian and Kat as they continue their expansion across the GCC region beginning with Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, the partnership between GHC and NowMoney aims to accelerate the company’s entry into Sub-saharan Africa. Remittances to sub-Saharan African countries totaled $48 billion in 2019. More efficient and cost-effective services for managing these remittances are key to keeping them flowing and further developing the countries that depend on them.

As our first investment in the GCC region, NowMoney represents a new stage of GreenHouse Capital’s growth. This announcement comes alongside the launch of a new office in Dubai led by Ruby Nimkar at GHC. We’re incredibly humbled and excited to be part of NowMoney’s story as it cements its position as a leading emerging market digital bank and continues to equip and empower people typically excluded from traditional financial services.