Every year millions of people travel to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj and Umrah pilgrimage. One challenge they encounter as they embark on the holy pilgrimage is the need to carry the local currency, Saudi riyals. This often leads pilgrims to purchase riyals through unofficial channels at inflated rates or exchange their currency, resulting in additional costs and potential legal issues if they exceed cash limits at airports.
Recognising these obstacles, UmrahCash, a FinTech firm founded by William Phelps aims to solve these challenges, especially for pilgrims travelling from countries in West Africa and South Asia.
“There are really three main ways in many developing countries to actually access riyals, either you use networks which are unregulated and no guarantee of success, you carry large amounts of physical cash which gets you into legal issues or alternatively, you buy Saudi riyals in your home country for a hugely inflated price,” says Mr Phelps.
“What this does is, not only put pilgrims at risk, but also often double or triples the cost of the journey in the first place.”
The new app developed by the company is simplifying “pilgrimage finance” and providing “easy access to Saudi riyals” through technology eliminating the “black and grey markets, giving a transparent paper trail for the actual exchange process from home country to Saudi Arabia”.
Customers have to download the UmrahCash app on their phones and deposit money in their home currency by bank transfer using the virtual wallet. Once the travellers reach Saudi Arabia, they can approach one of the company’s agents based in Jeddah, Makkah or Madinah to receive the cash.
UmrahCash is currently active in Nigeria and is being run on a pilot basis in Niger. It aims to expand to countries in South and South-east Asia including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh by the end of the year as it expects demand for such services in those countries.
“What we’ve done basically is to digitise as much as we can in line with local regulations but at the same time, allow pilgrims to feel comfortable because they’re still handling the cash as they are used to doing it.”
Mr Phelps, a UK citizen, worked in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria before launching the company. After graduating from Cambridge University in 2020, he worked as an equity derivatives broker in London for a year before moving to Lagos in Nigeria to work as an investment manager for Adaverse, a Web3 venture-focused fund for two years.
During his time in Africa, he managed more than 50 investments across 10 different African countries as part of his job.
He later moved to Riyadh to work for the same fund and oversaw the setting up of an accelerator programme to support tech-enabled companies in the kingdom.
While he was working in the kingdom, he decided to launch his own firm after noticing a “significant gap in the market, but there was also a very tangible pain point”, to address.
Any traveller going to Saudi Arabia can also use the app to obtain riyals but the company is targeting Hajj and Umrah pilgrims.
“UmrahCash in my view, is not just a commercial opportunity or a business. It’s an enterprise that actually adds tangible value to the experience of pilgrims and visitors to the kingdom.”
The positive investment climate in Saudi Arabia, the Arab world’s largest economy, also motivated him to launch the company.
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