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This startup is helping African workers spend wiser with a special discount scheme that lets them save more from their salaries

SAVE n FLEX was inspired by the desire to help small, medium, and large companies with cost-effective ways to offer their employees a wide range of discounts on everyday purchases.

A man placing a gold coin on a line of ascending coin stacks

Nigeria fell into its worst recession in 25 years in 2016 and this not only affected the price of goods and services in the market, but it also weakened purchasing power. While the prices of goods in the market skyrocketed, people’s salaries essentially remained stagnant.

Some companies downsized, some slashed staff salaries. Retailers were also affected, many of them seeing a drop in sales. In Nigeria and largely in sub-Saharan Africa, salaried employees often support their extended families. One unintended consequence of the recession was the large number of people who are dependent on the salaries of their family members in employment that were cut-off from that support.

Nigeria has climbed out of the recession, but not much has changed since. Prices remained high, purchasing power remained low. To help solve this problem, Ezra Anajonu came up with the idea for SAVE n FLEX.

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Ezra says SAVE n FLEX was inspired by the desire to help small, medium, and large companies with cost-effective ways to offer their employees a wide range of discounts on everyday purchases. For 1,000 naira per employee per month for an initial subscription, Ezra says companies can empower their employees to stretch their salaries and enhance their lifestyle, consequently improving employee engagement and productivity.

SAVE n FLEX also builds an ecosystem that gives retail startups access to a pool of already existing customers.

This is how it works: SAVE n FLEX signs up a company to one of its subscription plans and all the employees of the company have access to special discounts from retailers that SAVE n FLEX has already negotiated with. In the case that someone is running a retail startup and needs quick entry into the market, signing up on SAVE n FLEX gives them access to the pool of employees from the companies already on the platform.

Ezra tells me that the first deal worth 8 figures is already in place with a multinational company, giving its 2,000 employees discounts with retailers and lifestyle brands like Hotels.ng, Twice As Nice, NACK, etc.

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Leveraging on 22 years of HR experience that has seen team members work in organisations such as British Energy, EDF, and EY, the goals here for the SAVE n FLEX team are to give employees more benefits with less of their income, helping companies have a more motivated, more productive workforce, to give retail startups a quicker route to the market, and to help organisations navigate the after-effects of the recession.

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