Perez Ochieng is a London based Kenyan business lady who has been a driving force supporting smallholder sweet potato farmers in Kenya through her company Sacoma. Perez provides education and high quality seeds to the farmers to enable them to be self supporting. The sweet potatoes are then harvested and shipped to Europe for sale.
Perez was facing continual problems with the high street bank she had been using since the inception of her business. Often international payments would arrive late resulting in the farmers not being paid and produce left at the side of the road rotting. On top of this, the bank sending fees were very high, and the exchange rate very poor.
As a solution, Perez opened an account with VFX and was immediately able to pay the Kenyan farmers in real time direct to their mobile phone accounts with M-Pesa. No slow and expensive banks involved. With a super competitive exchange rate and a sending fee of only £1 Perez saved considerable sums enabling her to expand the programme quicker with the farmers. Perez now air freights the sweet potato crop and uses VFX’s treasury service to pay the logistics firm with a same day USD payment. As Perez expands the programme to the wider East African continent VFX will be there to facilitate payments to the other countries too.