Grace Ashiru
Dash, a fintech company in Africa that offers a unified payments system for mobile money and traditional bank accounts, has suspended its founder and CEO, Prince Boakye Boampong, pending an investigation into possible financial wrongdoing, TechCrunch reports, citing sources familiar with the situation.
The board has replaced Boampong with Kenneth Kinyua, the former CEO of the pan-African payments company Kopo Kopo. Kinyua recently joined Dash to take on a leadership role in East Africa. Kinyua will be the CEO for the time being.
Boampong is a well-known serial entrepreneur in Africa. In 2016, he helped start a Ghanaian media company called OMG Digital, which YC backed. In 2019, he started a new company called Dash. The company was worth over $200 million when it raised $32.8 million in March.
By March 2022, Dash had over a billion users from Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria and processed more than $1 billion.
Dash has increased over the past year, bringing in a lot of money, but the number of users and transactions has been questioned.
Sources say Boampong was put on leave because he lied about his finances. On the other hand, Dash’s board has said that the CEO is on “indefinite administrative leave” while the company goes through a forensic financial audit.
The audit should be finished in about a month. Meanwhile, people who know how the company works on the inside say that executives often hid financial information and talked about a messy workplace where employees quit or were fired at will.
