Co-founder and CEO of Hubtel, Alex Bram has stated emphatically that, contrary to speculations about the company’s ownership, the fintech has always had and still has only two shareholders – himself and his partner, Ernest Apenteng (pictured above).
He also stated categorically that for the past 19 years (2005 to 2024) that the company has existed, they have had zero investor funding, but has still emerged as one of the biggest fintech firms that Ghana has ever produced.
Since the Hubtel and ECG Ghana deal became a matter for public discussion, there have been widespread speculations about the ownership of Hubtel stemming mainly from the fact that the company is involved in a number of ‘juicy’ state-related digital projects.
The common chorus among speculators is that Hubtel belongs to the Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, while others say the Vice President at least has some commercial interest in Hubtel even if the company does not entirely belong to him.
Without adducing a shred of evidence to support their allegation, some speculators even go far as saying that the Vice President intentionally shifted his attention from the economy to digitalization just to use “his company Hubtel” to secure state-related digitalization jobs for himself.
Techfocus24 has been speaking with the CEO and Co-founder of Hubtel, Alex Bram who said he feels very sad that Ghanaians do not believe in the ingenuity of the country’s youth, so every successful Ghanaian company led by young people, is suspected to either have some local politicians as the main bank rollers or some foreign investors as financiers.
In his words, “Hubtel has since 2005 till date had only two shareholders – myself and Ernest. And we have never had any external investors. None whatsoever.”
According to him, Hubtel started as SMSGH in his father’s dining hall after he and his two initial partners first completed KNUST in 2005. Then in 2006, they got their first office at Adabraka in Accra, where they took the picture above.
The company then moved from Adabraka to Avenor in 2007, where it initially rented space in a three-story building for office. Then after a few years, it constructed its own office building on that same premises and has remained there since, with 22 other offices in eight cities across the country.
The company has since emerged from doing just bulk SMS and online SMS notification services for businesses, to now a fully-fledged fintech firm offering services in e-commerce, delivery, bills and utility payments, health and wellness, entertainment and gaming, education, as well as travels and transport among others.
The infographic image below shows the evolution of Hubtel from the days of SMSGH till date. Clearly, the company started operations and gained traction and recognition within the fintech industry long before the Vice President ever stepped into mainstream politics, much less starting his digitalization agenda.
Having emerged, by dint of hard work and innovation, as one of Ghana’s leading fintech firms, Hubtel together with two other leading local fintech firms formed a company called DigitalGOV, which developed Government of Ghana’s maiden fully-integrated payments processing and settlements platform, called Ghana.GOV, which ensures efficiency in revenue collection and accessibility to government’s services.
Ghana.GOV is a one-stop platform that enables citizen to easily access government services, simplify payments, ensure prompt payments for the services and promote transparency and visibility of internally generated funds which is accessible via www.ghana.gov.gh.
This far, over 1,507 Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs); Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) as well as State-owned Enterprises (SOEs) have onboarded the Ghana.gov platform. Currently, the platform records some 980,000 average monthly users, and processes some GHS8.6 billion average monthly transactions.
But in terms of the sectors Hubtel as a company serves, there are at least 11 of them listed in the infographic image below. Again, that clearly shows that Hubtel was doing brisk digitalization business across various sectors long before the Vice President ever dreamt of focusing on digitalization.
Let’s do some numbers:
By dint of hard work, ingenuity and innovation, Hubtel boasts of very impressive 4.6 rating on the app store, due its high performance in terms of the volumes and values of transactions on its platforms including a significant 11,000 app downloads every month.
Currently, the company boasts of at least 2.6 million monthly active users with almost 700,000 using its various services everyday. As a result, the company is processing some 3.26 million payment transactions daily and 1.25 million messages sent daily.
In terms of the values, Hubtel has so far processed GHS46.7 billion working with some 2,640 merchants across the country, and recording annual revenue of over GHS647 million, which represents more than 143% year-on-year growth between 2022 and 2023.
Hubtel operates in eight of Ghana’s cities. It has won at least six industry awards as a company, apart from what its CEO has won personally over the years.
Hubtel Pledge
As a good corporate citizen, Hubtel runs a corporate social responsibility program called Hubtel Pledge, under which it dedicates one percent of annual profits, one percent of paid employee time and one percent of its products to charity every year.
Under Hubtel Pledge, the company exclusively built an 18-classroom block and a state-of-the-art coding lab for St. Augustine’s Senior High School in 2024, and it also collaborated with AWS to support the AWS BASIC Summer camp in Ghana in 2023, to foster innovation and learning among the youth.
