Prince Boakye Boampong, founder and CEO of Dash, has been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation into financial impropriety. The Ghana-founded startup offers an alternative payment network with connected wallets that allow the exchange of mobile money with African bank accounts in Africa,
Consequently, the board has replaced Prince Boampong with Kenneth Kinyua, the former CEO of Kopo Kopo, who recently joined Dash for a regional leadership role in East Africa. Kinyua is to assume the interim CEO role.
TechCrunch reported that Boampong was suspended as chief executive for suspected involvement in financial misreporting. However, Dash’s board, in a joint statement, communicated a different angle regarding the former chief’s current status.
According to a board representative, Boampong was placed on “indefinite administrative leave on January 24, 2023, pending a forensic financial assessment of the company”. The representative declined to comment or provide further context regarding Boampong’s actions, but reports suggest the audit results could be released in a month.
On the interim CEO’s appointment, the board stated it is “confident in Mr Kinyua’s leadership and ability to execute the company’s mission to create a unified payments system designed to increase efficiency and accessibility for how Africans transact with digital money.”
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Prince Boampong’s alleged activities as Dash CEO
Prince Boampong founded the Ghanaian fintech in 2019 and is one of Africa’s well-known serial entrepreneurs after co-launching OMG Digital, a YC-backed Ghanaian media startup, in 2016.
The fintech company is a unified payment platform built to better how 1.3 billion Africans
transact with digital money. Currently, it is operational in Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria, with plans to expand into South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda.
Dash’s alternative payment network brings together mobile money and traditional banks and facilitates transactions for consumers and businesses. It doesn’t aim to replace mobile money or banks. Instead, its wallet allows users to access many services they can’t find on their traditional provider.
Last March, the Ghana-founded and New York–headquartered Dash raised $32.8 million in equity from Insight Partners, Global Founders Capital, 4DX Ventures and ASK Capital, among others.
According to TechCrunch, the seed round, which according to sources, valued Dash at slightly over $200 million, was the second-largest deal of its kind after PalmPay’s $40 million in 2019. It also signified Insight Partners’ first lead investment into an African startup; the $20-billion behemoth took part in Flutterwave’s Series C round in 2021.
Dash had intended to raise a quarter of that sum—roughly $8 million—as its seed round before obtaining more than $30 million. By October 2021, it had accomplished this after adding about 200,000 members and handling $250 million in transaction volume.
Five months after receiving its initial seed funding, in March 2022, the fintech had attracted one million users from Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria, and its overall processing volume had surpassed $1 billion.
That represents a 5x increase in users and a 4x increase in transaction volume in just five months. Dash was able to attract additional investors as it reopened and doubled its seed round thanks to its rapid growth and the fintech boom of 2020–2021 that continued into the first quarter of 2022.
The user and transaction volume growth that Dash reported within that brief time frame, however, may not have been entirely legal in some ways given that its growth figures significantly deviated from other African fintech that is typically observed regarding their scalability.
Insiders familiar with the company’s internal operations claim that management regularly withheld financial information and portrayed an unstable environment where workers may quit or be fired at any time.
The founder has yet to respond to any allegations or demand that any published material pointing to financial misconduct by his person be disregarded. This might not imply much, either, since he might not be allowed to make any statements until the probe is finished.
However, we may infer from sources with firsthand knowledge of the situation that the founder engaged in a secondary sale of shares valued at millions of dollars, a tactic that a few African founders used during the VC boom during the previous two years.
With regards to routing payments through banks and telcos regardless of who issued the card, Dash’s strategy has historically been most comparable to Visa or Mastercard.
For example, users from Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya can link their bank or mobile money accounts to Dash to pay bills, send and receive money, and send and receive money to other users while the platform handles currency conversions. The four-year-old fintech company makes money via subscription fees, processing fees, savings, and FX costs.
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