With the gig economy becoming increasingly popular for workers worldwide, there are common hurdles between those who demand services and those who pay — quality of work, and trust when it comes to payment schedules. Having been a freelancer myself in the past, this problem is quite evident, and PayLock is bridging this gap between freelancers and their clients.
PayLock is a digital escrow technology that facilitates international payment for businesses and individuals working with local or international clients. The technology helps ensure that customers protect their funds and goods from fraud, payment defaults, and non-delivery when they trade with their clients both locally and from abroad. PayLock targets mainly businesses that hire remote workers/freelancers, and international traders (importers/exporters).
Value for Businesses and Contractors
The value for this escrow technology is not only necessary for freelancers. For businesses that outsource work to remote workers/freelancers, the technology helps them to guarantee the quality of work and prevent situations where freelancers, individuals or business get compensated for work that they never do. This works vice-versa for freelancers too; PayLock streamlines the workflow between freelancers and their clients, ensuring they guarantee payment for their work before they even begin work.
Jerry Akanyi-King, Co-founder, explains, “PayLock works by keeping funds safely in deposit and only releases them in smaller payments as agreed milestones are completed. We make the whole process a lot easier than using banks while ensuring your clients are always paid on time with a payment method of their choice. PayLock is integrated with payment providers on three continents – Africa, Europe, and Latin America. As such, our customers can escrow/transact business with almost anyone in the world. Our unique user interface was designed and perfected after several iterations and user research; it’s user-friendly and naturally intuitive. This sets us apart from other products in the market.
Jerry Akanyi-King, Co-founder, PayLock
Growing into other markets
PayLock has officially launched in Accra, Ghana, and Santiago, Chile. Out of the usual hundreds of applications, PayLock got selected into the prestigious Latin-American Start-Up Chile Seed acceleration program. This immediately makes them present on two major continents in the world, where the gig economy is growing.
PayLock hit over $300,000 in transaction volume last month and are now looking to double down on the Ghanaian market and attract the next generation of freelancers and international traders looking for a secure way to do business with their international clientele.
Where It All Started
Before PayLock, the co-founders built TransGov, a citizen engagement platform where Ghanaians could report on public services, and rate them. The technical co-founders built TransGov after graduating from the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology in Accra, Ghana. After receiving much engagement from the community and some dead ends to becoming officially adopted by government, the two moved on to this.
Jerry Akanyi-King majored in Communications. He now leads the team and manages the business side of things. Kennedy Anyinatoe, also a co-founder heads the technology team and is responsible for PayLock’s engineering. His background is in Computer Science.
Jerry concludes, “PayLock was born out of the sheer frustration and need to solve several issues we had working with freelancers and working as freelancers. Five years of freelancing saw us with several terrible experiences not getting paid for our work. We poured our hearts into delivering our clients needs, but in return, received empty promises and growing unpaid invoices. We built PayLock to solve this and decided to make it available to people who have encountered similar frustrations.”
Jerry Akanyi-King, Co-founder, PayLock
Get in touch with PayLock on Facebook, Twitter, and on Instagram.
