Back to Wealtho
WEALTHO / INFRASTRUCTURE
Wealtho pays other companies to move your money. Most apps get tied to one of them for good. We built ours so we can change them.
Personal and Business
The ten jobs money has to do
Kora · Paystack · Mono
WHY THIS MATTERS
It costs Wealtho about ₦32 to send money. The law says we may only charge ₦10. So every transfer loses money. The only way out is a cheaper company, and we can move to one.
Most money apps build the company they rent straight into their own software. Their words. Their rules. Their way of doing things. It is quicker to build that way.
Then leaving means rebuilding the part that moves money. That is expensive and risky, so almost nobody does it. The company knows this. That is why the price never comes down.
We wrote down the ten jobs money has to do, in our own words. Send money out. Check who someone is. Take a card payment. Give a customer an account number. Link their bank. And so on.
The companies we rent sit behind those ten jobs. The app says “send this money” and something does it. The app never knows which company answered, so changing the company changes nothing else.
Changing company changes who answers. Nothing else in Wealtho changes.
It is easy to think you are free when you are not. If your system still uses another company’s words anywhere, you are still tied to them.
We went looking, and found three places where we had fooled ourselves. All three are fixed. Better to find them now than on the day we try to leave.
02 / WHEN THINGS GO WRONG
Money can go through, fail, or leave everyone unsure. Telling those three apart is most of the work.
HOW MONEY GETS LOST
You send money and the other company goes quiet. Did it go out or not? Guess wrong and you pay twice.
The lazy thing is to assume it failed and refund the customer. It looks careful. It is how you pay twice: once to the bank, once back to the customer.
Wealtho is allowed to say “we do not know yet”. It then goes back and asks. It never guesses. We found five places where this could have gone wrong and fixed all five.
If a company tells us the fee was zero, that is an answer. If it tells us nothing at all, that is not. Treating both as zero is how someone gets charged for something that never happened.
Small things like this are most of the job. Nobody sees them until the day they go wrong.
THE ONE PART OTHERS CAN USE
Working out Nigerian tax correctly is hard, and it changes. We had to solve it for Wealtho anyway. So we built it as a separate service that other companies can use too.
Eight calculations: PAYE, payroll, staff benefits, self-employed tax, withholding tax, VAT, company tax and capital gains. Each one follows the rules for the date you ask about, so last year is worked out with last year’s rules.
A company signs up, gets a key, and calls it. We count the calls. We never store their figures. There is nowhere to put them, on purpose.
Moving money needs a banking licence. Working out tax does not. That single difference is why tax is the part we can sell to other businesses today and the money side is not.
It is not finished as a product. There are no published prices, no sign-up page and no developer guide yet. The service works; the shop around it does not exist.
03 / WHAT IS REAL TODAY
People who read this can check it. So here is what is actually built and what is not, with nothing dressed up.
QUESTIONS
For tax, yes. Our tax service is live and other companies can use it with an API key.
For moving money, no. That part is how Wealtho works inside, and we have not opened it up. There are no published prices for either yet. We would rather say so than let you find out later.
No. They are partners and the work is going well. It only means neither side is trapped, which is healthier for both.
Most days you should not, and that is the point. It matters on the day one of these companies goes down, or gives a confusing answer about your money. You should never notice. That is the job.
Ask any money app what happens when the bank stops responding halfway through a transfer. Most cannot tell you. That one question separates the ones who thought about your money from the ones who did not.