The financial press often forgets about a certain type of business owner. Not the Silicon Valley founder who gave a TED talk and was worth a lot of money because of the hype. Not the businessman on Wall Street whose picture is on the cover of a magazine every three months. Bassim Haidar isn’t like other people, which is part of what makes his story interesting.
Haidar was born in Nigeria on February 2, 1971, to parents who were from Lebanon. He started building businesses in West Africa at a time when most Western investors wouldn’t have known where Lagos was on a map. He helped start Intercomm Ltd. in 1991, when he was still young. After four years, GMT came along and quickly became one of the best companies in West Africa for combining finance, logistics, and buying things. By any measure, these weren’t very exciting projects. They were useful, not very exciting, and the exact kind of work that slowly makes you rich.
As of 2003, Haidar had moved into the phone business. That year, he started a business called Channel IT, which was ready to provide infrastructure and services to Nigeria’s growing telecom sector. What began as a regional game ended up being played in 19 countries, with a big presence in Africa and the Middle East. Many people outside of the industry still don’t know how big Channel IT really is, but the numbers show that the company has been growing steadily over time, not quickly thanks to venture capital.
2011 was the year of the more important change. That’s when Haidar started Channel VAS, the business that people most often think of when they hear his name. Channel VAS is based in Dubai and does business in more than 42 countries, reaching more than 650 million customers. The business specializes in mobile financial services and fintech for emerging markets. It offers big data, analytics, airtime credit, and nano and micro-finance solutions to people in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America who don’t have access to banks. People in the Western fintech industry are now trying to catch up to what Haidar knew early on: that hundreds of millions of people needed access to money long before the term “financial inclusion” was used.
At this point, Bassim Haidar’s net worth is thought to be around $400 million. A lot of people who don’t know how big the mobile services market is in emerging economies might find that number surprising. Channel VAS doesn’t fit into a small group. It’s a business that hundreds of millions of people use every day because they use prepaid mobile services as their main way to bank. Scale that big, kept up across markets with complicated politics and bad infrastructure, doesn’t just happen.
Haidar and his wife Deidre live in Dubai, which makes sense since that’s where the regional headquarters of his company are. Entrepreneurs who work at the intersection of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia have long been drawn to Dubai. The way taxes work is good. The geography does too. He’s also linked to a house in Lagos, which fits for someone who has been building in West Africa for thirty years.
Haidar is also the owner of the Codecasa-built yacht Bash, which has a history that includes Mohammed Al Fayed owning it before. The yacht can hold 12 guests and a crew of the same size. He also has a private Gulfstream G550 jet with the registration number OE-LIM. This jet can go from Dubai to almost any big city without stopping. For someone at his level, these aren’t surprising skills. But they serve as a reminder that this place really does have a lot of money.
It’s hard not to notice that Bassim Haidar has built something really important while mostly staying out of the scenes that get media attention. His story is less about upsetting things and more about being patient. For 30 years, he worked in markets that other people didn’t care about, served customers that other people didn’t notice, and quietly built up the kind of influence that doesn’t need a press release.
