Within the first hour of launching its currency exchange platform in late 2018, TradeNAIRA got its first user wanting to send $4,000 to Nigeria. “We didn’t expect to receive so much demand, so quickly,” explained TradeNAIRA founder Martin Nwike, a businessman and entrepreneur based in London UK.
Since then the company has grown quickly and added many new services to assist people doing business and making simple day-to-day transactions in Nigeria. The company not only allows users to exchange currencies, it also allows users to send money to each other and pay for services safely online.
Currently TradeNAIRA supports currency exchange between Naira, US Dollars, British Pounds, Euros, Ghanaian Cedis and Bitcoin; with the list of currencies growing every month.
“We wanted to create a platform that was focused on the Nigerian experience. We all know that doing business and trading in Nigeria has its own particular challenges and very few options are available for sending and receiving money that are reliable, safe and cheap,” said Mr Nwike.
What is TradeNAIRA?
TradeNAIRA is a set of business services and functions that make doing business in Nigeria easier and more transparent. The currency exchange platform is one of the company’s key feature.
Users of TradeNAIRA can set up an account within a few minutes and can make a deposit in their local currency. They can then trade their money on the currency exchange platform,which matches prices from the different users automatically. So, if a user is exchanging US Dollars for Nairaand their price matches with another user somewhere else in the world then the money is exchanged automatically, in real time. The user can then withdraw the funds into their bank account or send it to another user through the TradeNAIRA platform.
“One of our key goals is to bring transparency into the Nigerian currency exchange market. All bid and ask prices are available to view at any time as well as all historic prices going back to the very beginning.”
Due to the changing regulatory climate in Nigeria, local banks have struggled to maintain a credible currency exchange policy that stands the test of time. TradeNAIRA plans to manage this problem by putting free market forces to use. By creating an open and transparent platform, Mr Nwike believes that whatever the economic situation in Nigeria, users can buy and sell their currencies for prices that suit them. Exchange rates are not set by TradeNAIRA but come as a combined result of the prices set by each user.
“Over the next few years we hope to be an essential part of doing business in Nigeria. We hope to build and manage services that make our users lives much easier and give them a strong advantage when transacting in Nigeria,” explains Mr Nwike.
The company has proven itself as being very innovative and ambitious, with many planned features currently being developed.
