ThankUCash

ThankUCash is a multi-merchant loyalty, cashback and deals platform operating in Nigeria, and is the flagship product of Lagos-based company Connected Analytics. Consumers earn cashback and rewards when they shop across a network of participating merchants — including supermarkets, restaurants, pharmacies and barber shops — and can move between merchants while accumulating loyalty value. For merchants, most of which have historically operated offline with manual bookkeeping, the platform provides a way to capture customer activity data, attract walk-in traffic and improve customer retention and revenue.

Beyond its consumer-facing app, the company positions itself as infrastructure for rewards, loyalty, deals, coupons, gift cards, cashback and buy-now-pay-later, offering plug-ins that banks and fintechs can use to run their own cashback and rewards programmes. Its BNPL approach connects merchants with credit and loan providers: when a customer requests a loan, the platform generates a code that the customer enters into an in-store POS terminal, crediting the merchant directly, with the code restricted to the selected store and the requested loan amount. Following its 2022 seed round, the company said it would add a remittance product allowing merchants to sell directly to the diaspora, and hired former managers of the defunct Nigerian deals company DealDey to build out its deals category.

Founding story

Simeon Ononobi, a serial entrepreneur who had previously built the Nigerian fintech SimplePay, an early phone-backup startup called Backup My Phone, and apps for Nigerian banks and government, founded the business with his wife Madonna Ononobi, Suraj Supekar and Harshal Gandole. Ononobi has described identifying two linked problems in Africa: small brick-and-mortar businesses closing at a high rate for lack of repeat customers and customer data, and consumers lacking the purchasing options — such as paying for goods over time — that he encountered while living in San Francisco during 500 Global's accelerator programme. The company was set up in Lagos to give merchants a way to bring customers back and to expand consumer buying power, starting with cashback as an entry product.

Business model

The company operates a two-sided rewards network: consumers earn cashback and access deals, while merchants pay for the customer acquisition, retention and data benefits. It also licenses its rewards, loyalty and BNPL capabilities as infrastructure to banks, fintechs and lenders that want to offer similar services.

Merchants pay a fee on every purchase made in their stores; for example, ThankUCash takes a 1.5% commission for each customer it brings into a store to redeem a 5% cashback item. The company also takes commissions on deals and planned to charge an onboarding fee for businesses using its APIs, including for buy-now-pay-later.

Traction

As of January 2022 the company reported more than 600,000 users, over 1,000 stores onboarded and more than $80 million in processed transaction volume, achieved in just over two years of operation with a team of about 45. A March 2022 500 Global profile cited roughly 600,000 users and a network of nearly 1,500 merchants.

Latest developments

In February 2023, Access Bank announced a partnership with Connected Analytics (ThankUCash) giving Nigerian cardholders 2.5% cash back when using Access Bank POS terminals.