Thursday, March 28, 2024

Peter Muchemi: Meet Kenyan behind innovative payroll and HR solutions for Air France, KLM

Peter Muchemi is the founder and CEO of Faidi HR, a digital payroll and HR company that he started in 2020.

His passion has always been in the digital space to assist companies in streamlining operations.

He cultivated this interest from a young age and turned it into a dream when he joined University to study Computer Science.

This helped him refine his software skills. Luckily, Muchemi landed a job as an intern at Consumer Insights and, later, Software Technologies Limited, among others, employed him.

“So, it’s at Eclectics International, where I’ve got so much experience when it comes to programming and payment systems, not just here in Kenya but also outside the country,” he says.

After acquiring sufficient work experience, Muchemi established Faidi HR in 2020. Formerly, the company was known as Crew HR.

His firm helps companies optimize their payrolls from manual to automated and streamline HR processes.

“We basically help small and medium enterprises automate their manual payroll and HR processes,” he states.

“So, we started back in the year 2020, and by then, the company was called Crew HR, but we rebranded to Faidi HR mid-last year after we got an investment from a US investor called Sprintex,” he noted.

With Faidi HR, individual consultants and companies are able to manage payroll processing, generate pay slips and create reports for multiple clients using a single account.

Like many techpreneuers, Muchemi noticed a gap in the HR sector and opted to use technology to solve it.

He observed inefficiencies in the manual processing of payroll and HR services at the firms he worked for.

Transactions took an extended period to complete. He aimed to offer a more efficient solution to these challenges through his startup.

“When we started, we had so many challenges, and one of them was capital, so we relied on our own savings,” Muchemi said.

“I remember I had saved quite some amount of money that I used to fund the company’s operations. So capital was the biggest challenge,” he added.

One of the first firms to grace his work was FIDA Kenya, among the largest NGOs in Kenya. Little by little, he started attracting huge brands as his clients.

They include KLM, Air France, Renegade Air, and Lima.

“And it is true that we now use such claims as a reference, and now we have trust from companies like even Air France,” he explained.

When starting, Muchemi had a small pool of clients, between 20 and 30 firms. Over the past year, he says that numbers have grown to more than 150, and forecasts show they expect to triple clientele.

“But since mid-June last year, our company portfolio has more than doubled, and we expect that number to also triple.”

Pricing

Muchemi mentioned that the platform is affordable and flexible, with the option to select and personalize desired features.

Faidi HR provides services that are classified into three categories: Basic, Standard and Premium.

READ: Sammy Ekaran: 28-year-old Kenyan develops Africa’s first AI content generation software

“So basic, you’d pay Sh. 120 per employee,” he says on managing the digital payroll inventory.

“The premium cup package comes with advanced modules like performance and appraisal projects, and that ranges from Sh. 200 to Sh. 300 per employee,” he states.

The other pro of Faidi HR is its ability to integrate with other systems, such as biometrics solutions.

Challenges

Muchemi’s greatest adversities in this avenue have been convincing customers to use his solution, given their scepticism of the automation idea.

This is mostly because they have to put their data on the cloud.

“And you’re proposing this to big companies, established companies that are more than 20 years old,” Muchemi discloses.

So they were a little bit skeptical about whether we could trust these young people to manage our data. So that was one of the biggest challenges.”

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