How Bamboo is Helping Nigerians Earn in Dollars Through Foreign Investments

With naira’s constant devaluation, earning solely in naira will delay your goal of becoming a billionaire. Earning money in foreign currencies like dollars by investing in foreign stocks is one of the best ways to start building wealth.

Some of the wealthiest people in Nigeria own large quantities of foreign stocks and iinvestments.

Although it is very attractive, investing in foreign stocks can be very tedious and expensive making it also impossible for an average Nigerian to partake in it. However, Bamboo a Nigeria based fintech company has a solution to help people trade in foreign markets easily.

Over $150,000 Funds raised

Founded in early 2019 by Richmond Bassey and Yanmo Omorogbe, Bamboo is a digital investment platform that provides real-time access to buy, hold, or sell stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and American depositary receipts (ADRs) in the United States.

The startup has raised a total of $150K in funding over 3 rounds. Its latest funding was raised on Apr 1, 2020, from a Seed round involving Tahseen Consulting.

According to the startup, its mobile app gives you unrestricted access to over 3,000 stocks listed on both the Nigerian and US stock exchanges.

With the promise of helping people invest in over 3,000 foreign and local stocks easily, we reviewed the Bamboo App.

Bamboo App: Over 10,000 downloads

The Bamboo app is easy to download with a size of just 7.3 MB on Play Store. It has a star rating of 4.4 from over 350 reviews and has over 10,000 downloads.

After downloading, you can click the ‘GET STARTED‘ button to begin the sign-up process. An icon showing Nigeria and two other African countries will then pop up. Selecting Nigeria takes you to an account details page where you input all your information.

P.S -As at the time of the review, the two other African Country on the pop up were Ghana and Kenya. They were both ashed out and unclickable with the words, ‘coming soon’ written beside them. This means that Bamboo will probably launch in Ghana and Kenya soon.

After entering general details like name, gender, date of birth, phone number, email address and password, your personal account will be created. However, you will be prompted to confirm your phone number via code and also enter your Bank Verification Number.

A digital signature of you entering your name will be used to acknowledge that you accept the terms and condition and a pin to protect your account will be requested. After that, you just need to just fill in your investment profile and fund your account to start investing.

Investing with Bamboo

Navigating the Bamboo app was easy. The home page has a featured theme that contains different classes of stocks you can invest in like Technology, Health and Blockchain.

The app also has features like Watchlist where you can search and add stocks you are interested in, learn where you can get various information about how to use the Bamboo app, buy and sell stock among other information. It also has a help icon where you can talk with a live customer care representative.

A Bamboo user, Shalom Ukpai, said loved the features of the app. She said that the app has amazing modern Interface, instant purchase of stocks, Up-to-date news information of companies in the stock market and prompt feedback of customer service.

However, she added the timeout feature needed to be reviewed, as it was too fast.

Before you can buy a stock you need to fund your account with at least $20. You can do that either from the home page or your personal profile which shows all your financials.

After entering the amount you want to deposit in dollars, it’s immediately approximated in a naira equivalent. Depositing $20 costs about N9,352 at a rate of N467 to a dollar, a rate which is higher than the current approved N381 approved by the CBN.

Payment can be made using Naira card (fee N130.94) or Dollar card (fee $0.58), physical (fee N150) or online (fee N130) bank transfer, Barter app (fee N130), wire transfer and USD Dom Transfer.

Once your account is funded, you can buy stocks of big corporations like Apple, Alibaba and Google. By clicking on the stocks you are interested in you can check the price and then proceed to buy it.

Although Bamboo claims to have more than 3,000 stocks to choose from, a Bamboo app user, Effiong Bassey complained that the app was missing many stocks that were available in a competition app, Trove.

In summary, with N10,000 you can start earning in dollars with the Bamboo app. The app is easy to use and informative that even if you are new to investments, it will be easy for you to pick up your phone and start investing.