Narda Ventura — Making school fees Ezee
Co-founder and chief executive officer of ezeepayments.com, Narda Ventura, recounts that she wanted a more accessible and more efficient way to pay school fees as a working mom. It was the inspiration behind launching the bootstrapped payment solution called SchoolFeePayments.com with her co-founder Kyle Lewis.
After three years they decided to launch in March 2020, coinciding with the onset of the novel coronavirus pandemic. After six months of pitching to the market, the result was not encouraging since schools had not yet adopted online payment of fees. However, not undaunted and driven by market research, they pivoted, and the solution evolved into ezeepayments.com, which Ventura now describes as a “turnkey” solution.
As a subsidiary of its parent company, SkyBlue Transactions Solutions, ezeepayments.com is a licensed payment facilitator that operates using a customer to customer (C2C) and business to business (B2B) business model. The solution works by receiving and transferring funds to merchants and other customers, similar to Stripe and Paypal.
Ventura says that the solution is primarily for micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) that want to engage in e-commerce but lack technical knowledge, such as a website that meets security payment requirements and operates within time and budgetary constraints. Ezeepayments.com offers easy onboarding, and is also highly flexible, allowing the company to tailor their features to meet the merchant’s requirements. Their application programming interface (API) facilitates further integration with other merchant systems. Ezeepayments.com plans to expand its product offering to deliver flexibility in its solutions.
If a merchant already has a website, ezeepayments.com plug-ins and hosted payment pages allow customers to land on a branded page in a seamless customer experience. For businesses that use social media or e-mail channels, ezeepayments.com also offers a payment button or a quick response (QR) code that direct the customer to the company’s branded payment page. The QR code, links/button, website plug-in and API are collectively known as “transaction origination” methods which the platform natively supports. In addition, the “turnkey” solution also provides an easy-to-use dashboard, where all transactions are processed for the merchant regardless of the transaction origination method.
Ventura is proud that ezeepayments.com is also a secure, payment-card-industry (PCI) compliant solution. No customer or cardholder data is at risk during transport or after the information is stored. The solution only holds the minimum amount of data required to facilitate investigations on transactions. Further, if the system is compromised, the hacker would not access a cardholder’s data.
As a woman in tech, Ventura considers herself an aggressive entrepreneur who can solve problems for people who have similar challenges. She is growth-oriented and unrelenting in her pursuits. Ventura also wants to make a significant impact in the FinTech space by providing solutions that serve the underbanked and help businesses scale.