Fixing a broken connection

How Talk 360 & NjiaPay turned €20,000+ in hard-to-track monthly SaaS spend across two companies into a fully transparent operation with Cardboard.

About Talk360 and Njiapay

Talk360 is an international calling app on a mission to connect underserviced communities worldwide, with a special focus on Africa. The app allows users to make affordable calls to any mobile or landline number, without the recipient needing the app, internet access, or even a smartphone. Co-founded in 2016 by South African venture builder Dean Hiine and Dutch entrepreneurs Hans Osnabrugge and Jorne Schamp, Talk360 has grown to connect over 7 million people with loved ones across the globe. The company operates with an international team spread across offices in The Netherlands, South Africa, Nigeria, and India.

While scaling its calling app across African markets, Talk360 identified a massive adjacent challenge: over 70% of African consumers are unable to purchase international digital services due to a fragmented payment landscape, i.e. 54 countries, each with unique card networks, mobile wallets, and cash solutions. This insight led to the creation of NjiaPay.

NjiaPay, co-founded by Jonatan Allback and Roderick Simons, was spun out of Talk360 in late 2024 as a standalone Payments-as-a-Service platform. Based in Amsterdam and Cape Town, NjiaPay builds a payment orchestration layer that intelligently routes transactions to the best-performing payment service provider (PSP) in real time, using AI and machine learning. For Talk360 itself, consolidating six PSP integrations into NjiaPay's single API increased checkout conversions by 25%.

Both companies share a Head of Finance, Fabio Iannotta, who oversees all financial operations across the group.

Two companies, two methods, one problem

As Talk360 and NjiaPay scaled in parallel, their SaaS stacks grew organically, but each company developed its own distinct financial headache.

At Talk360, all subscriptions — marketing tools like Canva, design platforms like Figma, customer support software like Intercom, and more — were charged to a single American Express credit card owned by one person. Over €20,000 per month in transactions spanning SaaS subscriptions, travel, and representation costs sat on that one card with minimal traceability. The finance team had no way to determine what each charge was for or who had authorized it, leading to a repetitive monthly cycle of chasing business owners: "Did you spend this? Is this tool yours?"

Because the card was in one person’s name, the finance team couldn't independently access transaction data or gain real-time visibility. Everything had to wait till they received the credit card statement.

NjiaPay had the opposite problem. Rather than a shared company card, team members paid for subscriptions and expenses using their own personal credit cards and then submitted refund requests to Finance via email. What arrived was a patchwork of PDFs, screenshots, and forwarded receipts, all landing in Fabio's inbox with no standardized format, no central record, and no real-time visibility.

The common thread

The spending was technically separated between the two entities, but both were following their own way of solving the SaaS purchase and receipts issue. At Talk360, the problem was a black-box credit card no one could audit. At NjiaPay, it was a scattered reimbursement process no one could keep up with. The result for Fabio was the same: very limited visibility and very limited predictability when it came to forecasting.

Cardboard brings instant order

Fabio was introduced to Cardboard by Jonatan Allback, NjiaPay's co-founder. The onboarding experience was what Fabio described as a "nice surprise."

With Cardboard, the finance team was able to:

• Map every subscription to a specific card and payment method, instantly seeing which tools were being paid for and through which channel
• Assign budget ownership linking each subscription directly to the responsible person, eliminating the monthly "who spent this?" chase
• Bring structure to two different workflows by replacing Talk 360's shared card and NjiaPay's scattered reimbursement process with a single, organized view of all recurring software costs
• Gain real-time visibility by replacing guesswork with a live, organized view of all recurring software costs across both entities

Key benefits

Why this matters for scaling companies

Talk360 and NjiaPay represent a profile that is increasingly common among fast-growing, internationally distributed startups: companies whose operational complexity outpaces their financial tooling. Whether it's a single shared card that nobody can audit or a reimbursement process held together by email attachments, the pattern is the same — finance teams left spending their time chasing information instead of using it.

This is especially acute in the African fintech and telecom space, where companies like Talk360 and NjiaPay operate across multiple countries, currencies, and regulatory environments. When you're building infrastructure to solve payment fragmentation for an entire continent, the last thing you need is fragmentation in your own internal financial operations.

Cardboard eliminated the guesswork, transforming an opaque €20,000+ monthly spend into an organized, visible, and auditable system. Among Cardboard's first customers in The Netherlands, Talk360 and NjiaPay demonstrated that companies moving fast across multiple markets need financial tooling that keeps pace, and Cardboard delivered exactly that.

Join Talk360 and NjiaPay and other tech companies who've already made the switch to Cardboard for managing their software subscriptions and online spend.

Your CFO (and your entire team) will thank you!