Brought to you by Africreate — Africa’s leading innovation-focused advisory firm.
Eke Urum is the Founder of Nigerian wealthtech Rise.
Launched in 2019, the Techstars-backed company has raised over $2 million in VC funding and offers users dollar-denominated managed investments in equities, real estate, and fixed-income assets.
In this conversation, Eke takes me behind the scenes of Rise’s recent acquisition of Nigerian stock trading platform Chaka — a deal that some people are calling the deal of the year so far in Nigeria tech.
This conversation was originally recorded on October 6th, 2023.
Among other things, Eke and I discuss:
• How Rise is differentiated from other trading platforms collectively referred to as the ‘Robinhoods of Africa’
• The rationale for and mechanics of the Chaka acquisition
• How the market downturn affected the willingness of both parties to do this deal
• Why Chaka isn’t being rebranded & what’s next for the combined Rise-Chaka entity
• What investors can offer beyond capital
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Transcript:
[00:00:00] Emeka: Hello, everyone. Today's conversation is with Eke Urum, founder of Nigerian wealth management platform, Rise. Thanks for being here, Eke.
[00:00:09] Eke: Thanks for having me, Emeka, I appreciate it.
[00:00:12] Emeka: My pleasure. Now, of course, Rise just announced its acquisition of trading and investment platform Chaka, and that's what I want to talk to you about. So some people in Nigeria are calling it the deal of the week or the deal of the year in Nigeria, and I think there's a lot of lessons there that founders can learn. So I'm really excited to have you here just to talk a bit about that.
But first of all, I think it's actually important to talk about Rise. So I think there are a lot of misconceptions. You know, some folks don't exactly know how Rise is different. So just to give a bit of context, there are a number of trading platforms across Africa, like Trove, Hisa, obviously Rise, Chaka, Thndr in Egypt, EasyEquities in South Africa.
There's a number of them that are powered specifically by the trading tech platform DriveWealth. But I think unlike them, and you'll clarify for me, but I think Rise is the only one that is actually a US SEC Registered Investment Advisor.
So you guys are able to do some things differently — you provide managed portfolios, you don't let users pick stocks, individual securities themselves, right? So just for background, for early context for anybody watching and listening, just how would you say Rise is differentiated from the other players in the space?
[00:01:34] Eke: Sure, thanks for that question. So like you said, the first thing is that we are the only ones that have that direct US regulatory structure where we're a Registered Investment Advisor with the US SEC.
